Re: entities and characters?

On Nov 30, 2003, at 11:20 AM, Tim Bray wrote:

> You might find
>   http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/27/UniEmacs
> and
>   http://norman.walsh.name/threads/xmlunicode
>
> relevant, although they are quite Emacs-focused.

Hi Tim,

Yeah, I've read this stuff before, and I get the sort of abstract 
argument.  Since I'm on Mac OS X and use emacs, I'm happy to just use 
unicode characters directly and be done with it actually.

However, I'm trying to understand how to deal with this specific 
example, where a) the spec needs to deal with extended characters, 
often (at least currently) in attributes and b) the person developing 
the DTD (Peter Flynn) uses Linux for the most part, is happy with DTDs 
and their entities, and loathe to learn something like RNG unless he 
must.  I'm also worried about the portability of the instances that 
results from the spec.

It seems to me it is in fact a bad idea to base anything new on 
entities, but I'm not sure if this is the correct conclusion, nor 
exactly why.  At the same time, I gather that using raw unicode 
characters will cause problems for many people, at least currently.

Bruce