Re: Proposal: Document use of control characters
"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 94 13:13:46 EDT
Message-id: <9406161713.AA02297@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: Proposal: Document use of control characters
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In message <9406161206.aa11328@dali.scocan.sco.COM>, Murray Maloney writes:
>
>Proposal: Identify the control characters in ISO 8859/1
>that are recognized as valid HTML.
Seconded.
> identify those
>control characters which are not valid by specifying
>them as SHUNCHARs in the SGML declaration, and document
>them in the HTML specification. For each control character
>that is valid, identify its meaning and potential uses.
I'd say this list is:
Decimal ASCII "code" HTML Meaning
in BODY in PRE
9 HT word break col := (col+8) mod 8
10 LF word break col := 0; row := row+1
13 CR word break col := 0
Hmmm... about CR and LF in PRE... what about Mac generated documents
taht only use CR vs. unix that only uses LF vs. DOS that uses CRLF?
The above definition works for unix and DOS, but not Mac. Is that
OK for everybody?
>For all control characters which are not valid, list
>the characters and their codes, and specify the error
>(if any) which may result if the character is discovered.
Perhaps somebody could run some tests on existing browsers to see
whether it's reasonable to say whether other chars 0-8, 14-31 should
be ignored altogether or treated as wordbreaks.
Also... do we leave open the possibility that folks will want to use
these unused characters for special purposes (such as graphic code set
switches) in the future?
>The following two characters fall within 8859/1.
>Their behaviour should be specified in the standard.
>
> 160 nbsp no-break space
> 173 shy soft hyphen
There has been entity in the spec for a while. Would somebody
run some tests to see if it's supported in the various browsers? If
so, we'll call it standard. If not, it'll have to stay in "proposed
purgatory" for now. Oh... and could we run some checks on "
while we're at it?
I've been wondering what should stand for -- I thought it
would have to be SDATA or a processing instruction or some such. I
had no idea there ware character positions assigned to "non-breaking
space" and "soft hyphen". So the proposed DTD fragment is:
<!ENTITY nbsp CDATA " ">
<!ENTITY shy CDATA "­">
Dan