Re: [xml-dev] Character Entities: An XML Core WG View

[Joel Bender <jjb5@cornell.edu>]

>We need all the people who think they need a new mechanism to get
>together and thrash out what they really need.  And very few of those
>people are on the Core WG.

I may be over simplifying the problem...

It might be relatively easy for the various groups to agree on a 
document format to express name to character mappings, like Simon's 
Ent.  So perhaps the W3C can recommend a way to describe the mapping 
being used in a document or document fragment, similar to

     <myStuff xml:entities="http://simonstl.com/projects/ents/HTMLrules.xml";>
         When it's 100&deg;F out, it's hot for Ithaca.
     </myStuff>

The W3C gets out of the naming game, but there is at least a hook 
that applications can use to get/cache/recognize character sets. 
Groups can cooperate on short and long names for characters as 
necessary, and XML doesn't change.


Joel

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