Matt Thommes wrote:
What benefits or problems avoided do you perceive by doing this and
what other characters are you escaping?
Lea, I'm not sure why I always escape the dash - perhaps because I can??? :)
I am assuming the dash will someday cause me problems, so I just
escape it now, to avoid a lot of re-work.
Other than that, I escape a lot of "usual characters," such as single
quotes, double quotes, and ampersands.
For some reason, I feel I have to escape every character that is not a
letter or number.
I think this is quite an interesting discussion, and I'm sure some of
the members of this list can shed more light on this, but I do think
developing with the best of practice forsight of the day does at least
help to future proof web sites to address evolving technology. We never
know if the search engines or parsers of the future are going to have a
hard time or easy time making sense of our sites. I know I have
developed sites in the past that I have felt pretty confident have been
a good attempt at best of practice, but age sure shows their vintage,
and I am not talking about the CSS, just thinking of the (X)HTML.
Tidy can help with transforming characters, but it does screw some pages
up (don't know if those bugs have been fixed).
So what about <Q> or <quote> (XHTML2)? Who bothers to use it?
References
http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-norm/#sec-WhyNormalization
http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/
---
Geoff
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