Re: Proposal: Recommend complete entity list

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 94 16:59:29 EDT
Message-id: <9406172057.AA05435@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: Recommend complete entity list 
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In message <9406171632.aa13356@dali.scocan.sco.COM>, Murray Maloney writes:
>Proposal: Additional character entities
>
>
>This entity set should be included in the HTML 2.0 DTD.

Remember: 2.0 is descriptive. Descriptive. Descriptive.

I consider it a requirement for standardisation in the 2.0 spec that
there be a test case that works on at least two existing and widely
deployed browsers.

I agree that &nbsp and &shy should go in ASAP _after_ 2.0 -- perhaps
in a 2.1 document where we patch up mistakes that are easy to patch
up. And I'm willing to include this whole set as "proposed" in the 2.0
document so that implementors will start seeing it, unless Terry gets
his way and all "proposed" idioms are unspeakable in the 2.0 spec.

>This entity set should be included in the HTML 3.0 DTD.

I agree.

>Although these characters are not known to WWW browsers
>by these names at the current time, they are mostly known 
>by numeric character reference.  

Would somebody care to verify this? I know I just tried
this morning to use &#160; as a non-breaking space, and
Mosaic didn't grok.

>
><!-- ===========================================================
>     These are character entity names which do not have
>     a convenient and available graphical representation
>     in the ASCII, ISO 646 or ISO 8859/1 code sets.
>
>     The contents shown here represent a crude attempt
>     to use existing and available characters to represent
>     the character that is required.

I'd suggest that we define these as SDATA entities rather than CDATA
entities, to allow system-specific rendering. Defining &horbar; as
CDATA "--" means that &horbar; and "--" are indistiguishable to the
rendering application and must be rendered identically. Defining it as
SDATA "--" means that we intend for different systems to define the
entity different ways.

Dan