Re: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?

[Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 05:28:39PM +0100, Philippe Poulard wrote:
> what about referring character entities by their Unicode names instead 
> of their domain-specific names ? it's the same but less antique and more 
> universal
> 
> something like this :
> &#(MEASURED ANGLE);
> instead of
> ∡

It's not very internationalized.
This would only be OK if it was available in every language, it
seems to me.

But since that would be an intolerable burden on implementations,
it's best to allow user-defined charactes.

Of course, one also often wants a character that's actually a composite,
and then the fact an XML entity today can contain a string, and even
markup for bold, superscript, overline, etc., becomes very useful.

The possibility of semantic information above the actual character is
also important for some use cases, e.g. for searching, or for changing
product names, company names, etc... &product; &version;... to some
extent XInclude can replace this functionality, but only if the
XML is designed with this in mind.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/