On 04/03/2012 00:08, Darren New wrote:
> On 3/3/2012 14:04, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> It's not possible to type exotic characters.
>
> Sure it is. I just turned on chinese for my wife. Use alt-shift to
> toggle between languages. :-)

That doesn't make the characters available on your keyboard though. It's 
not like you can just press a button and have a different set of 
characters printed on your physical keyboard.

> The problem is that your *editor* doesn't make it simple to type exotic
> characters, yes? Why do you complain that your XML processor doesn't
> understand exotic characters when its your editor that makes them
> difficult to type?

It's not the editor that makes them hard to type. It's the fact that 
computer keyboards only have a few hundred keys, not several billion 
keys. (Heck, even then it would be pretty difficult to actually /find/ 
the one you want...)

In most situations, that just means that you flat-out /can't/ use 
unusual characters. HTML, and now XHTML, are fairly unusual in that they 
let you type in the character's name if you can't easily type the 
character itself. Unfortunately, rather than make this useful feature 
available to all XML applications, they arbitrarily chose to make it 
available to only one.

>> ...aaaand then watch it break into a thousand pieces because raw text
>> files
>> have no way of specifying what actual character encoding is being
>> used. :-P
>
> That's why the first line of your XML document includes the character
> set in which the rest of the document is written. *right there* is the
> reason you have to put <?xml ...> at the start, along with the funky
> code number for your character set.

That tells an XML processor what the character encoding is. It does not 
tell your text editor what the encoding is.

>> It would be frighteningly easy to come up with
>> an XHTML+MathML DTD where the XHTML part doesn't actually match the
>> stand-alone XHTML DTD, for example.
>
> Sure. And it would be frighteningly easy to come up with a generic
> sorting algorithm that works incorrectly on certain types. Don't do that.

The point is, to make a DTD for a combination of trees, you have to 
/copy/ the DTDs for each subtree - and hope that you don't do it wrong. 
Talk above violating the DRY printiple...

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