Re: DoubleLongLeftArrow character entity

> Perhaps they did not understand the nature of CDATA, i.e., it's
> something that no processor should *ever* need to give *any* special
> handling beyond possibly a simple "lookup".

It's not so clear cut.

The question is whether it should be

<mo>&longrightarrow;</mo>
or
<mo some-attribute="long">&rightarrow;</mo>

Which are two possibilities in the style of MathML, one could as well
have

<xxx name="longrightarrow"/> or <longrightarrow/> in other markup
languages (ie have no character data at all, in which case Unicode
wouldn't be involved.).

Basically in XML you get a set of characters from Unicode, and if you
want to say more, you use markup. In some circumstances it's handy to
have more characters and less markup (which is why Unicode gets bigger
every now and then) but it is never absolutely necessary it's just a
matter of judgement about what is best place to make the cut.
If Unicode was the same as 7bit ASCII you could express exactly the same
things in XML as you could using the full Unicode 3 character set, it
would just be a lot less convenient (especially if you were not writing
in English).

David


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Received on Thursday, 11 January 2001 13:33:23 UTC