Thats UTF-8, 'Universal Text Format', you can represent ANY possible character with no entities in UTF formats. UTF-8 is the easiest to use because its a superset of ASCII. Your text editor just happens to be smart enough to know what to do with it, most aren't. Thus the only problem with using strange characters is that if you send the file to someone with a dumber piece of software they will most likely see gobbledygook instead of an emdash... Entities simply let you represent those things in a format virtually any software can work with.
Hopefully all the world's software will be UTF-8 capable eventually. Of course the other issue is getting your keyboard to generate these characters. Thats probably the real reason I doubt entities will ever go away, its just plain a lot easier for programmers to use them. I couldn't even tell you how to make an emdash on my system, though certainly its possible! On Thursday 06 March 2003 01:32 am, S Woodside wrote: > I just discovered something really cool..... I'm on OS X, in project > builder, and I set the document encoding of my XML to UTF-8 in the info > box. Then I type in special characters — like the em dash — and poof! > They work! No entities needed! > > Is there a reason that I shouldn't be doing this?? > > Why did I never hear about this before?? > > simon > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Tod Harter Giant Electronic Brain --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
