"Martin J. Dürst", Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:20:31 +0900: > On 2012/07/18 16:35, Leif Halvard Silli wrote: >> "Martin J. Dürst", Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:42 +0900: > >>> The best reason is simply that nobody should be using >>> crutches as long as they can walk with their own legs. >> >> Crutches, in that sense, is only about authoring convenience. >> […] Nevertheless: I, as Web author, would perhaps skip that >> convenience if I knew that doing so could improve e.g. HTML5 >> browser's ability to sniff the encoding correctly […] > > I'm not sure there are many people for whom using named character > entities or numeric character references is a convenience. But for > those for whom it is a convenience, let them use it.
By all means: Let them. But the W3C's I18N working group still gives out advice about when to (not) use escapes.[1] Advice which the homepage of W3.org breaks - since every non-ASCII character of http://www.w3.org is escaped. What the I18N group says in that document, is a bit moralistic (along the lines 'please think about how difficult it is for non-English authors to read escapes for all their characters). It seems to me that a mention of real effects on browser behavior could be a better form of advice. Especially when coupled with advice about avoiding the BOM.[2] [1] http://www.w3.org/International/techniques/authoring-html#escapes [2] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark#bomhow -- Leif Halvard Silli
