Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum


"spinoza1111" <spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
On Dec 30, 3:34 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
languages can be build on top of ASCII, as has happened successfully
with HTML.

Doesn't HTML use double-byte numbers represented in ASCII? Doesn't it
depend on Unicode?

Here's the Wiki article

In addition to native character encodings, characters can also be encoded as character references, which can be numeric character references (decimal or hexadecimal) or character entity references. Character entity references are also sometimes referred to as named entities, or HTML entities for HTML. HTML's usage of character references derives from SGML.

Character entity references have the format &name; where "name" is a case-sensitive alphanumeric string. For example, the character '?' can be encoded as &lambda; in an HTML 4 document. Characters <, >, " and & are used to delimit tags, attribute values, and character references. Character entity references &lt;, &gt;, &quot; and &amp;, which are predefined in HTML, XML, and SGML, can be used instead for literal representations of the characters.

Numeric character references can be in decimal format, &#DD;, where DD is a variable-width string of decimal digits. Similarly there is a hexadecimal format, &#xHHHH;, where HHHH is a variable-width string of hexadecimal digits, though many consider it good practice to never use fewer than four hex digits, and never use an odd number of hex digits (due to the correspondence of two hex digits to one byte). Unlike named entities, hexadecimal character references are case-insensitive in HTML. For example, ? can also be represented as &#955;, &#x03BB; or &#X03bb;.

Numeric references always refer to Universal Character Set code points, regardless of the page's encoding. Using numeric references that refer to UCS control code ranges is forbidden, with the exception of the linefeed, tab, and carriage return characters. That is, characters in the hexadecimal ranges 00-08, 0B-0C, 0E-1F, 7F, and 80-9F cannot be used in an HTML document, not even by reference -so "&#153;", for example, is not allowed. However, for backward compatibility with early HTML authors and browsers that ignored this restriction, raw characters and numeric character references in the 80-9F range are interpreted by some browsers as representing the characters mapped to bytes 80-9F in the Windows-1252 encoding.

Unnecessary use of HTML character references may significantly reduce HTML readability. If the character encoding for a web page is chosen appropriately then HTML character references are usually only required for a few special characters (or not at all if a native Unicode encoding like UTF-8 is used).


The &name; format is dependent on ASCII and has several advantages which I mentioned in my reply to Richard Heathfield. However it is not the only encoding HTML 4.0 recognises.

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