> Amanda wrote: [about numerical character references]
> >The only reason they exist in the first place is that named character
> >entities could not be relied on in all browsers, and it was a "quick
> >fix."
> Incorrect. They are in SGML so that typists could enter characters
> not directly supported by their keyboards. HTML inherits them from
> SGML.
Um, why is it harder for a typist to type £ than to type £ ?
I suspect Amanda is right; the early browsers did not have an adequate
repetoire of known named character entities.
Speaking of numeric references, the current HTML 3.0 DTD
(Draft: Fri 24-Mar-95 09:46:33) says:
<!ENTITY % HTMLlat1 PUBLIC
"-//IETF//ENTITIES Added Latin 1 for HTML//EN">
%HTMLlat1;
Now, looking at <http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/latin1.html>
which is marked as needing further work, I only see named character
entities for the accented characters, ie
&192; to &214; and &216 to &246; and &248; to &255;
This seems undesirable. I think there should be named entities for all
the characters that might not be on someone's keyboard. To this end,
here is what I use for HTMLlat1:
<http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/test/HTML_3.0/html-lat1.txt>
Comments appreciated. There are 8 bit characters in there; is that OK?
-- Chris Lilley +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Technical Author, Manchester and North HPC Training & Education Centre| +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Computer Graphics Unit, | Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk | | Manchester Computing Centre, | Voice: +44 61 275 6045 | | Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.M13 9PL | Fax: +44 61 275 6040 | +-------------------------------------+ BioMOO: ChrisL | | URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/lilley.html | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | "The first W in WWW will not wait." François Yergeau | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+