HTML characters and Unicode status?

Peter K. Sheerin (psheerin@best.com)
Sat, 8 Jul 95 21:09:20 EDT

I have two or three questions about the current state of HTML.

1) Has there been any more discussion on using Unicode/ISO 10646? It seems
to me that it would be of great benefit in supporting the characters
needed for HTML math support.

2) I've read in one place that HTML 3.0 was being phased out, in favour of a
more natural progression from 2.0, to 2.1, etc. Is this true?

3) In exploring the various characters which are and aren't allowed in
HTML, I've noticed that browsers do some wierd things, including
displaying characters that just happen to be in the local character set,
but aren't in ISO Latin-1, and are in fact marked as reserved or as
control characters (Netscape is guilty of this).

Does the DTD specify what a browser does with such a (numeric) character
reference? Shouldn't it? If not, then by what method should it be defined
and communicated to web browser developers what to do in these cases?
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