I am sorry for my lack of clarity: perhaps living in Japan so long has
robbed me of the ability to communicate in English well...
>Lou, I think I hear you saying there must be no nasty surprises and
>numeric character references must continue to give the same printed
>characters they did before?
For ISO-8859-1 documents, this is not a problem. However, my proposal
may break Mosaic-L10N, and some of the other non-ISO-8859-1
browsers. The behaviour of such browsers is undefined by the current
HTML specification anyway, but...
>So, a change to the wording which had precisely no effect on current
>documents but set us up better for the future would be a worthwhile
>change, no?
I wouldn't say "no effect". The overall effect should be minimal
from a practical point of view, but profound in the long term.