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Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View

• To: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>
• Subject: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 07:52:46 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <4.3.2.7.2.20021101164430.028dea30@m...>
• References: <4.3.1.2.20021101084950.0123fc10@m...><4.3.2.7.2.20021101164430.028dea30@m...>

At 4:47 PM -0500 11/1/02, Ann Navarro wrote:


>That's not what I'm referring to. You may think uniform names are 
>good, but I'm hearing/reading that you think it's perfectly 
>acceptable to force average document authors to write internal DTD 
>subsets to be able to write "Pepsi ™".
>

I think you're asking the wrong people to fix the wrong problem. 
There is a usability issue here. However, that issue is not that 
™ must be declared in an internal DTD subset. ™ is not 
very usable in itself. I almost always type &tm; and then have to 
debug my mistake. But this is really the usability problem, isn't it? 
It's not that you can't use certain entity references. It's that you 
have to use them at all. Systems for user input and display need to 
be designed to allow simple input and display of necessary 
characters. Character entities are a gHorribleKludge no matter how 
they're declared, whether predefined or not.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
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