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RE: UTF-8+names

• To: <michael.h.kay@n...>, "'Tim Bray'" <tbray@t...>, "'David Carlisle'" <davidc@n...>
• Subject: RE: UTF-8+names
• From: "Alessandro Triglia" <sandro@m...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 17:20:13 -0400
• Cc: <elharo@m...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <004e01c39681$95521d00$6401a8c0@pcukmka>

Michael Kay wrote:
> 
> > That is to say, I can see non-XML applications finding it 
> handy to be
> > able to say "Martin Dürst said so." but I don't see a 
> common use 
> > case for "Clearly in this case Ir < Is", unless you're 
> > headed for XML.
> 
> When will it be handy?
> 
> I could see it being handy if it encoded allowed any Unicode 
> character to be represented using ASCII characters, because 
> that would enable me to enter Unicode at a keyboard. But it 
> only allows some Unicode characters, and I still need a UTF-8 
> aware editor to enter the others!
> 
> So (a) why not make it ASCII-based rather than UTF-8 based, 
> and (b) why not allow numeric character references to be 
> expanded for the characters that don't have names?


If numeric character references (with the same apparent syntax as XML's
numeric character references) were introduced, they would hide completely
XML's numeric character references.  As a consequence,  XML numeric
character references would need to be encoded as 

	& & ; # n n n ;

rather than as

	& # n n n ;

in order to be visible to an XML processor.

Consider, for example, 

	<el att="abc&#x26;" />

This is not well-formed if  &#x26  is a character reference at the encoding
level.  It represents exactly the same Unicode character sequence as 

	<el att="abc&" />

does.

Therefore either a different syntax must be specified for the encoding-level
numeric character references, or the above must be encoded as:

	<el att="abc&&;#x26;" />

Alessandro


> 
> Michael Kay
> 
> 
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