Re: [xsl] International Characters in attributes

Subject: Re: [xsl] International Characters in attributes
From: "Michael Beddow" <mbnospam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 11:24:32 -0000
On Monday, February 12, 2001 10:47 AM
David Carlisle wrote

> No, in XML and in HTML (4+) a numeric character reference always
refers
> to  the unicode position. It does not refer to th eposition in the
> current encoding.

Ok we all agree on utf-8 both in theory and practice as fas a XML is
concerned. And I know what's supposed to happen in HTML 4+, but I'm
not convinced that's gone home to all the browser implementors to
judge from the odd things I've seen. The other reason I keep banging
on about this is that a lot of people who use my XSLT-generated html
are in universities, and you wouldn't believe the number of very early
NS4 builds, not to mention NS 3 and even NS2  there are out there on
campuses (including well-funded ones) Once you have significant
numbers of users like that you simply have to forget what the
standards say and fudge like mad to get the characters they expect to
see on to their screens. And XSLT is a very good fudging device, even
though that may make standards-conformists cringe.

> (It isn't only Asian languages that you mention that use "long" utf8
> byte sequences, Unicode 3.1 promises to add around a thousand
> mathematical aphanumeric symbols into plane 1, and these will be
used by
> MathML systems)

To be joined by maybe 40,000 more Chinese characters, including a
whole bunch needed to work round problems in the existing 20,000 odd
in the BMP. Fun days lie ahead.

Michael
------------------------------------------
Michael Beddow
http://www.mbeddow.net/



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