> Personally I think glyphs/entities in HTML should have been tags with > alt or title attributes. I strongly disagree. All glyphs have an agreed upon meaning as indicated by their context[1]. They are *NOT* abbreviations. Is a capital sigma a glyph representing summation or a letter in the Greek alphabet? And since all letters, numbers, punctuation, and other related symbols are glyphs, what you're are proposing (admittedly, taken to the extreme) is... <p><abbr title="The English letter T">T</abbr><abbr title="The English letter h">h</abbr><abbr title="The English letter i">i</abbr><abbr title="The English letter s">s</abbr><abbr title="The English exclamation mark">!</abbr><abbr title="The English question mark">?</abbr></p>
Hmm, guess I messed up the terminology. I'm not proposing anything like that. What I'm talking about is unusual little shapes rendered to the screen based on &blah; ;) Some are relatively clear, for example the copyright symbol is not ambiguous because it was created for a specific purpose and I can't immediately think of any uncommon uses. But there are others which are not so clear. Think about the heart symbol. It's in UTF as "black hearts suit" or something. But people use it to say "I [heart] unicode". Would it make any sense to read out "I black hearts suit unicode"? The symbol has been used to indicate the word "love". So what I'm getting at is that the name of the symbol may not be the same as the concept it communicates. Do people truly write "No. 12 Somewhere Street" meaning "Numero 12 Somewhere Street"? No, they mean "Number 12 Somewhere Street" (well, in English-speaking nations anyway). In the same way, they might say "#12 Somewhere Street"... do they want people to say "right, so you live at hash twelve Somewhere Street"?
From a purist's point of view, people should never say "I [heart]
whatever" since that's not what the Black Hearts Suit symbol is for. But we know that people do use it this way and will keep using it this way. Hence my opinion that there should be an optional method for declaring a specific interpretation of the symbol (character, glyph, entity wossname). I hope that's a clearer statement of what I was driving at :) cheers, Ben -- --- <http://weblog.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
