Re: Special entity characters in Shift-JIS XSL.

> But wouldn't it be nice to have something written into the spec

which spec? there is nothing that could be put into the xsl spec, as
what you are asking for is a change in XML 1.0, this is why your
suggested markup of using &# syntax will always be fragile and flaky.
As soon as your documents are touched by any xml parser the characters
may (or may not) be written out as character data in the document
encoding rather than as character references, since the xml spec makes
it explicit that these are equivalent when used in element character
data. 


SGML had sdata entities, but they were intentionally dropped from xml.
If you want some information in the document to survive to the
application use an element such as <foo/> or use characters but make
your application treat &#1234; _identically_ to the character with
unicode position 1234;


> document, losing its status as an "entity" that would ultimately be needed
> by the final HTML document.

No. firstly the entities are not needed by HTML you can (or should) be
able to use entities or the characters directly, but in any case the
HTML output method for xslt will use entities however the character was
entered. You can put &#160; or that character directly in a stylesheet
but it typically gets linearised as &nbsp;

David


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