Re: Unicode and child element

Ken,

> The Unicode characters  through  are specifically 
> "non-characters", which means they must not be used to represent 
> characters in a data stream between sender and receiver.  This means 
> that two trading partners must not use them in XML documents, which 
> makes them available for XSLT users for this character mapping 
> technique without interfering with user data.

I'm not sure I see it that way, these non characters are not actually
banned by XML systems so (like private use characters) their use (or non
use) is constrained by convention rather than technology.

Given that XSLT files  are XML, it would see that this convention would
suggest that they not be used here as well. If you say that the
convention will ensure that this character definitely won't appear in an
XML source file, what happens if someone uses the XSLT document as
input?

> I'm not aware of people actually using private characters for
> interchange

We (in MathML 1) got our figures severely wrapped for using private use
characters for math (because the math characters were not added until
Unicode 3.1 and 3.2, many years later) on the grounds that specifying
"private" uses for private use characters would greatly hamper usage of
the standard in Asia, particularly, where apparently a certain well
known operating system used lage chunks of the private use area for
commonly used document code pages.....

> Nevertheless using non-characters for this XSLT stylesheet character
> mapping seems  to me to be better guidance than using private-use
> characters. 

But could be construed as breaking the convention that says that
non-characters not be used in documents.

David

________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________