RE: Understanding character handling

yes - but what a lot of people are forgetting is that EVENTUALLY! these
documents will have to be produced by humans who have no idea what  
is, and may only have a rudimentary knowledge that   is a non-breaking
space (or maybe even what a non-breaking space actually does).

Its best to keep the "plain-language(?)" identifiers in there.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 08, 1999 2:54 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Understanding character handling



>   The need for this is very real. If we can't write entity references in
our
> result document, we're reduced to using all manner of horrible kludges to
make
> our viewers see the right thing. Who wants to do...

> ... contortions with nbsp deleted.

Why is this a problem.   is just the character &#160, so why do you
need to write `nbsp'. No machine parsing the result will care which you
use. It only `matters' if you plan on reading the result by eye.
If you want to write `&nbsp' in your stylesheet rather than remember the
unicode number, you can do that now, with the current draft. Just
declare the entity in your stylesheet. The only point at issue is that
the entity will be expanded by the XML parser that reads the stylesheet
and so the character (entity) will appear in the result rather than the
named entity, but since these should have the same effect in the result
document why does it matter.

I seemed to have switched sides in this thread somewhere along the way:-)

David


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