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> This issue is one that won't be solved by appeals to authority
in general yes, but in terms of people giving definitions of entity
sets in W3C specifications then I think it would help to have a W3C set
rather than a MathML one. And would definitely be a prerequisite if the
solution proposed by some of building a fixed set into XML 2 was ever to
be considered.
> This is because they are just one of the stakeholders,
> and they must have an interest in just rubberstamping whatever
> HTML has done.
XML is W3C-badged and explictly didn't follow that route.
> On the other hand, part of the point of the ISO entities is that they
> are intentionally flexible, so that people can choose the best possible
> mappings from characters that actually have counterparts in fonts.
> It might have seemed perverse to them to add characters intended
> to be ambiguous. :-)
Well yes that's the point of SDATA entities but that flexibility was
intentionally dropped from XML, which is probably OK in most common
cases, but that leaves the problem of what to do about legacy SGML to
XML conversions. Life would have been a lot simpler if there had been
enough Unicode characters to unambiguously support the ISO entity sets,
as it is you have to "unify" several characters that were previously
considered distinct. this may or may not be safe and it's not at all
easy to tell how safe it is if it's not your document.
I agree with most of your outline for coming up with a
unified set, and I'm happy to help with that in any way, I just think
that it should finally be a W3C XML activity recommendation, otherwise
it is just another incompatible set.
David
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