Re: The "%" in DTD

Mike,

> > http://www.pinkjuice.com/entities/

> This is also wrong in that it calls character references "entities",

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
calls them "Character entity references"
some abbreviate that to "entities".

> and,
> as noted, fails to be a reliable reference when used with Netscape 4.x.

NN4 has problems with rendering large tables; IE5 does that better;
NN6/Moz can render progressively: the table rows get displayed as the
are generated and downloaded (in the other two browsers, one has to wait
for the complete table to be downloaded until the first line gets
displayed)

> All this reference does is demonstrates how your browser renders those
> character references when it encounters them.

Exactly.
That's all it's intended for: it says:
"Get numeric character entities for special characters in HTML, XHTML,
XML, SVG, etc. ;
see how special characters look like in different fonts;
and check which are available in different fonts."

I hope that it fulfills this.

> It is heavily dependent on
> the browser, the fonts you have installed, and the mechanisms your browser
> uses for selecting fonts. 

It should; it's to be used to find out which character entity references
work in which browser, and how the look in different fonts.

> Please, folks, if you are trying to find out what a character reference
> *should* and *does* mean, just refer to the specs that define this stuff
> without ambiguity -- XML, HTML and Unicode. Testing "〹" in your
> browser is not the way to go about it.

Absolutely: then, after the correct numbers are found in the resources
you mention, everyone working on real-world applications needs to test
which work in which browsers with which fonts installed.

Tobi

-- 
Tobias Reif
http://www.pinkjuice.com/myDigitalProfile.htm

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