Re: Special entity characters in Shift-JIS XSL.

["Sean O'Dell" <sean@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > But wouldn't it be nice to have something written into the spec
>
> suggested markup of using &# syntax will always be fragile and flaky.
> As soon as your documents are touched by any xml parser the characters
> may (or may not) be written out as character data in the document
> encoding rather than as character references, since the xml spec makes
> it explicit that these are equivalent when used in element character
> data.

OK, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought & entities were to allow unicode
characters and for aliasing special characters.  Unicode characters are
2-bytes and I thought & was designed to allow 2-byte characters to pass
through 7-bit ASCII processes.  If an & entity passes through one parser and
gets turned into a unicode character that exceeds 7-bits, how can it then be
passed to anymore parsers expecting 7-bit ASCII characters?  It can't.

What if you need the & entities to survive an unknown number of
XML-compliant parsers?  What if you need them to survive an unknown number
of parsers and the unicode characters that need to survive come from the XML
output, thus making it impossible to know in advance in the XSL document,
making it impossible to perform some sort of "aliasing" trick to correct the
transformation?  What if each of those parsers followed the spec, the first
transforming the character into a 2-byte unicode character, leaving the
others to see the two bytes as simply two different characters in the
stream?

I think the OPPOSITE of flaky is the word I would use to describe an entity
identification paradigm that allows the entity to remain in its encoded
form, yet still be identified as an entity.  I think solid is more the word.

    -Sean

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