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Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View

• To: jcowan@r...
• Subject: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 17:20:25 GMT
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200211041717.MAA05674@m...> (message fromJohn Cowan on Mon, 4 Nov 2002 12:04:03 -0500 (EST))
• References: <200211041717.MAA05674@m...>

> Come on,  this sort of problem is trivial.

It sounds trivial, but it's not trivial to solve really.
You can (and MathML does in its prose text) deprecate that entity but
it's not deprecated in  Docbook or XHTML and it's still a name in the ISO
entity set. Making a combined set is not technically difficiult, you
just do it, or just pick one of the existing ones, but it requires
leadership to state which of the sets is the "combined one" It's
leadership that for some reason you seem unwilling to provide.

Of course also this is just one small example which I picked on, but it
is an inevitable consequence of combining separately authored language
modules, which is something namespaces and schema is suppose dto
encourage.

> *Mildly* inconsistent.  *Resolvably* inconsistent.  AFAIK.

The inconsistencies are only mild if you don't use the entities which
have different definitions. If you do then it can be a crippling bar to
interoperability Or, more likely the case, people don't notice and do
interoperate and documents get silently mangled in ways that are not
noticed until it's too late.

The problem is resovable. it has just remained unresolved (to take the
asymp example) as long as docbook and html4  have both existed (or was
asymp introduced before html4, can't remember- it doesn't matter).

> The only thing necessary for the triumph of inconsistency is for good
> standards weenies to do nothing.

Doing nothing is exactly the plan outlined in the Core WG document.


David

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