Re: HTML 2.0 LAST CALL: Hyperlinking, Forms, Elements

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Thu, 1 Jun 95 23:19:05 EDT

In message <13824.9506012013@afs.mcc.ac.uk>, lilley writes:
>Problem description
>-------------------
>
>Section 5.1 (p25 of the A4 PostScript version) states:
>
> The HTML DTD references the Added Latin 1 entity set, to allow mnemonic
> representation of Latin 1 characters using only the widely supported
> ASCII character set repertoire.
>
>However, the DTD references a collection of entities called
>
>ISO 8879-1976//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN//HTML
>
>which only supplies named entities for a subset of the non-ASCII characters
>in ISO Latin-1, namely the accented characters. The remaining characters
>may only be referred to by including their 8bit code positions or by using
>numeric entity references (listed in the non-normative Appendix A).
>
>Thus, either the text in 5.1 should be altered to read
>
>[...] selected Latin 1 characters [...]

I'm going with this editorial change, rather than any technical change
at this point, even though folks on www-html seem to think that &copy;
and &reg; are already part of HTML 2.0. Ya'see, not all the named
entities you suggest are currently supported, and it's a slippery
slope where you draw the line.

>Evidence of consensus
>---------------------
>
>On Mon, 10 Oct 1994 10:52:16 -0500 Daniel W. Connolly
>(then connolly@hal.com) said in a thread entitled "Perceived Consensus:
>Murray's entity stuff goes in"
>
> <http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/html-wg-94q4.messages/0048.html>:
>
>> Agreed: if we need names for characters, and there's an ISO entity
>> name for the character, we'll use it.

The operative word there is _will_ -- I was speaking about a minor
revision of HTML to address a few things like &copy and &reg and <sup>
and <sup> that, at that time, I thought would be called 2.1. I never
meant to imply that the HTML 2.0 DTD would change.

I am inclined to hold firm on any changes to the DTD, even for the
much-needed internationalization improvements. An internationalization
document is needed ASAP, but I am leery of letting I18N issues delay
2.0 any longer.

Dan