Subject: Re: &xnnnn;

From: "Alain LaBont/e'/" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 19:05:50 -0300

A 09:52 10/05/97 -0700, Unicode Discussion a écrit :
>At the HTML WG meeting, I hope to help sort out the various i18n-related 
>errors in Cougar.  This mail deals with one point which is a proposal rather 
>than a bug report.
>
>As:
>
>1.  the Cougar document character set is ISO 10646/Unicode, and
>
>2.  that standard uses a hexadecimal character numbering scheme, and
>
>3.  not many people are good at doing hexadecimal-to-decimal conversion in 
>    their heads,

[Alain] :
Just because of this, the ISO/IEC 14755 (Input methods to enter UCS
characters) uses the notion of "catalog number" for characters. End users
all are familiar with the notion of catalog number. In ISO/IEC 14755 this
notion is now standardized in thinking about end users and the fact that
UCS/UNICODE ids are in hexadecimal only (these are the character catalog
numbers). Hence in using such a catalog number end users don't need to be
aware about hex to decimal conversion or to binary...

[Misha] :
>it would be helpful to allow hex NCRs.  It would be best to follow the XML 
>syntax for this and follow the "&" with an "x".  All of these represent the 
>same character:
>
>   A
>
>   &65;
>
>   &x41;  
>
>Note: ISO 10646/Unicode allows more than four hex digits and so
implementations 
>should be built to cope with NCRs such as "&xnnnnn;".  [...]

I agree with this.

Alain LaBonté
Québec