Re: questions about entities and entity declarations

At 01:02 PM 9/30/96 GMT, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:
>I don't see much difference between a character number and an alphabetic
symbol.
>Both ultimately have to be mapped to some character semantic, and thence to a
>glyph. But that mapping should occur in the style sheet. 

But you can't make the mapping if all you have is a number. In the 8859-1
world, you have to select the font first. If you only have a number you
can only assume the current font. Since that usually restricts you to
ISO Latin1, you can't even get an emdash into the text, let alone math
symbols.

>If you want to use symbolics, use the existing ISO character entity sets and
>remove the SDATA keyword, since the entity text isn't system-specific data. (I
>originally intended those declarations to be templates for real system
data, but
>no one uses them that way, I've been told.)

Some tools do use the replacement text to good effect (even your favorite--
Author/Editor). I like it 'cause it gives me an opportunity to make some
changes as necessary. Other tools just use them as symbolic names and make
the mapping elsewhere (forcing me to go hunt it down).

>But I'm happy to leave the resolution of character set issues to those more
>passionate about them than I. I only proposed eliminating internal SDATA to
>simplify entity declarations and because, unlike external SDATA entities, there
>is no standardized way to  specify a notation. Of course, we could adopt the
>convention that I (and others) proposed earlier for PIs, but that would still
>leave us with a special kind of internal entity, and I think that XML should
>have all its internal entities resolved.

I don't have a clue how character set issues will affect this. In my current
systems, it's completely disconnected because the glyph for a character
depends on the current font. If anyone could assure me that this will be
a non-issue, then I'll be happy (as long as I have their home address for
insurance...).

bob

Robert Streich				streich@slb.com
Schlumberger				voice: 1 512 331 3318
Austin Research				fax:   1 512 331 3760

Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 21:53:17 UTC