[odf-discuss] Re: ODF and UTF-8/16/32-HEX/DEC/DECHTML

[J David Eisenberg]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-22-02 at 00:27 +0700, Damon Anderson wrote:
> > Where I take issue is with using < and >. HTML supports UTF-8  
> > Decimal fully, so should XML.
> 
> XML supports everything HTML does. Indeed, XHTML is an XML-compliant
> implementation of HTML. XML can be written in any encoding, including
> UTF-8. ODF files can be written in any encoding, including UTF-8. ODF
> files are usually written in UTF-8.
> 
> I have no idea what you mean by "Decimal" or what this has to do with
> XML entities.
> 
> > < and > should be XML extensions, not defaults.
> 
> How do you propose denoting the < and > characters without ambiguity?
> What benefit is there to typing <a><</a> instead of <a>&lt;</a>? It just
> creates more work for parsers and human beings (e.g. "was that a typo or
> is that < really supposed to be there?") for no benefit. And this has
> nothing to do with UTF-8. These characters are plain-old ASCII.

Daniel: I've been following this conversation (though not very deeply), 
and I think what he means is that everything should be done in numeric 
codes:  &#x3c; or &#60; for the less than symbol, &#x3e; or &#62; for the 
greater than symbol, and *never* use any alphabetic entity abbreviations.

I'm guessing that if ODF specified that a document were to always use the
numeric codes, Mr. Anderson would be happier. But I'm just guessing.

-- 
J. David Eisenberg  http://catcode.com/