The use of < and & to represent < and & never
seemed to fit cleanly into the SGML view of things.
So I posted to comp.text.sgml.
I think I'm a lot clearer on the matter now. The
< and > entities are meant to be used in typesetting
mathematics, where a less-than symbol is not necessarily
the same thing as a '<' character.
There's a mechanism for referencing characters in the
document character set in such a way that they will
not be treated as markup: numeric character references.
I'd like to get rid of the <, >, and & entities
from the HTML DTD. Granted, there will be a transition
period while providers adjust, but I think it will make
the spec cleaner.
Anyway, here's what the experts had to say...
[edited...]
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml
From: Erik Naggum <SGML@ifi.uio.no>
Reply-To: Erik Naggum <enag@ifi.uio.no>
Message-ID: <19921210.008@erik.naggum.no>
Date: 10 Dec 1992 07:36:57 +0100
References: <1992Dec10.020628.4884@news.eng.convex.com>
Subject: Re: hiding <, >, and &
Lines: 111
[Dan Connolly]
:
| There is a lot of need for a routine represents an arbitrary string
| of characters as SGML data -- a routine that hides <tags> etc. from
| the parser.
The simplest would be to use character references for the characters
that you need to quote. See 9.5 Character Reference, [357:10-13].
...
The way I see it, this is a completely failsafe technique.
| [It does bring up the question of representing " and ' characters in
| attribute value literals. Hmm.. another situation I think I'll
| just avoid.]
What's wrong with "'", '"', """, and '''?
...
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum ISO 8879 SGML +47 295 0313
ISO 10744 HyTime
<erik@naggum.no> ISO 9899 C Memento, terrigena
<enag@ifi.uio.no> ISO 10646 UCS Memento, vita brevis