On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Roger B. Sidje wrote: > > > > Ian wrote about entities > > > > > Yeah... Do we really need those? Some of them seem reasonable to add, but > > > 2000 seems like too many for the mnemonic advantage to beat just using > > > Unicode codepoints... > > > > I'd say that it's probably not worth including only a few, it would just > > lead to confusion. > > I am actually a fan of entities because they improve readability a fair > bit. I hope Ian won't give up thinking on this issue so quickly... > especially in the context of MathML where strange characters are quite > common.
I really don't want to start introducing weird rules for parsing entities (I'm trying to simplify the entity parsing rules, not make them worse). At least not at this stage. Maybe once we have a proof-of-concept working, it would make more sense to revisit the issue, but I'd want to do a thorough scan of the Web to see how common these entities actually are today. > As to my suggestion that "if [a document] is strict then maybe entities > could be required to have a semi-colon -- which will then avoid the > ambiguities", to which Ian responded that, "That would break > back-compat." > > We have other cases of broken back-compat. -- where users were told to > use a non-strict DOCTYPE or some other workaround, e.g, line-height of > images. Yeah. And we can see how well _that_ went. QA nightmare, multiple overlapping codepaths, obscure bugs, confused authors, contradicting documentation, etc. Let's not go there again. The whole point of MathML-in-HTML is to have back-compat work -- if we didn't care about back-compat, we would just have people use MathML-in-XHTML. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
