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> From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...> > Martin, I am dismayed that you of all people are counselling egregious > non-conformance in this manner on this forum. -Tim I don't think he was...in his original post he said that the formal XML reference was AC; but that on Microsoft systems the code 128 worked. This was in reply to a question "In other words, how do I specify my small salary in euro's?" which I took to be a request for a workaround. Maybe we also need to figure when we need to specify characters and when we just need glyphs (pictures). I think the thing that a character has that a glyph may not have is that it is interesting for searching, indexing and collation. If you need a "character" that is not in ISO 10646 but it will not be interesting for searching, indexing or sorting, then you really just want a glyph, and an embedded bitmap or a reference to a particular font may be fine for you, if you can get it looking OK. If you do need to stick in an actual character, then you can make use of the user-defined codepoints available in ISO 10646. Then, as a next step, you need to provide a mechanism in your markup to map the code point to some element or entity or processing instruction. SGML has a mechanism called short-references you can use for this, but you still will have to build it into your software, since it is not part of XML. You can use PIs instead of markup declarations: instead of SGML's <!SHORTREF blah ...> in XML you could just use ISO 8879 (i.e. the SGML standard) as the PI target <?IS8879 SHORTREF blah ...?> So ISO 10646 gives us free code points we can use. ISO 8879 gives us the short reference mechanism to let us map a code point to any kind of markup we need. XML lets us use ISO 10646 and provides PI targets so we can use any ISO 8879 declaration (that we care to implement) in the body of the instance. So all that is needed is to name the character and give its characteristics as far as collation etc goes, and to point to a glyph. For this the TEI Writing System Declaration may provide some useful conventions. Rick Jelliffe ICQ#7587145 xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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