Keld wrote:
One way to accomplish the use of characters outside the current
character set, is to use symbolic names for the characters, eg the mnemonic
ones in RFC1345. It is already done to some extent in richtext, viz.
the <lt>
There might be an advantage in distinguishing characters from spans of text
syntactically. In other words, <bold> and <a-acute> are really rather
different things. The SGML default syntax of &a-acute; is I think unsuitable
as people are likely to want to use the "&" in messages (!), but @ might do,
as in @a-acute; or the Keldish names of two characters :-), as in @dh;.
But I think this is a little pointless. Again, SGML already has a
mechansim for using symbolic names, and it works. It isn't perfect, as you
have to quote every & (unless, as here. it's followed by a space or newline).
I am not convinced that the richtext should be reinventing this stuff; I
could probably be convinced that it needed this facility, but then it
probaby ought to use the ISO character names where they apply, no?
Lee
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