Re: [xsl] amp symbols

Subject: Re: [xsl] amp symbols
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:51:02 -0400
Chad,

At 01:25 PM 7/3/2006, you wrote:
The vendor recommends a UTF-8 encoded file. So when I create an XML
file (before any XSLT is applied) I get just square boxes where those
math symbols and other items usually appear. I think this is why they
require the use of an entity. Does that make more sense or am I still
missing the point?

They're not mutually exclusive: you're making sense, but still might be missing the point. :-> It could be that the character is correct, except the interface you are using to inspect it (browser, editor or whatever) has no glyph to show the character, so it shows you a box. This doesn't necessarily mean the character has become a box character in the data; it could still be the correct character, just hard to see and hard to check for correctness.


In such a case an entity may be a more legible representation of the character, but as you can see there's also a price to be paid for demanding it. The ideal would be to use tools capable of showing you what the character actually is. In an imperfect world, requiring entities or numeric character references might indeed be a pragmatic way of evading the problem or the appearance of a problem. Whether it's worth the tradeoff is another question.

Cheers,
Wendell

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