Re: HTML 2.0 LAST CALL: Numeric character refs (fwd)Precedence: bulk

Martin J Duerst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch)
Fri, 2 Jun 95 15:56:19 EDT

Terry Allen:
>Dan:
>| In message <9506011134.ZM18015@dmg.west.ora.com>, "Terry Allen" writes:
>| >Dave Morris writes:
>| >| On the other hand, references to undeclared entities
>| >| + and numeric character references which cannot be resolved
>| >| + (e.g., are out of range)
>| >| should be treated as data characters.
>| >
>| >And are not what we want to say here.
>| Why not?
>
>Because this section is about entities, not numeric charrefs, which
>are dealt with elsewhere (grep for 10646).
>
>| > The language about
>| >numeric charrefs has been carefully crafted. It will be
>| >revised in the next version of HTML that appears after an
>| >internationalization proposal is agreed upon (Gavin, time to
>| >get a move on).
>|
>| Agreed, but...
>
>So you're just going to throw out several weeks of discussion
>(I'm sure you can find it without citations) because one person
>made a suggestion opposed by one other person who participated
>in that discussion? I'd say you have no basis for making the
>change.

Although I have difficulties in following who is advocating what
in this mail, and what discussions are referred to, I am clearly
in favor of having the text regarding NCR and document character
set exactly as in the currently available in
draft-ietf-html-spec-03.txt.

Many reasons for not specifically mentionning error behaviour
for "out of range" NCR have been given by Terry.

My additional argument is that in the internationalization
document, we will have to address the question of what
should be done if a NCR can be correctly parsed, but
due to some system limitations (e.g. missing fonts), it
cannot be displayed. At that level, other solutions, such
as displaying a "unknown character" icon/glyph make more
sense.

Now from a end user point, it makes no sense to have
"out of range" and "undisplayable" characters represented
in completely different ways.

Specifying that "out of range" NCR have to be treaten as
data is therefore unnecessarily specific.

-----------------------------------------------
As a different point, I wonder why there is no reference
to ISO 10646 in the reference section. Is there some specific
reason, or has it just been forgotten?

Hope this helps, Martin.

----
Dr.sc. Martin J. Du"rst ' , . p y f g c R l / =
Institut fu"r Informatik a o e U i D h T n S -
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