On 3/4/2012 9:07, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> 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.

Actually, you can, yes. http://www.lcd-keys.com/english/history.htm

:-)

> 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.

And yet, oddly enough, billions of chinese people seem to get along OK.

It's still the case that you're addressing the wrong technology. The file 
itself has no trouble storing the characters, yet you want the file storage 
technology to compensate for your computer's inability to put the characters 
into the file conveniently.

Fix your input mechanism, and store the characters. Don't fix every program 
that reads characters to deal with names. Fix your *editor* to deal with 
names. Make it so when you type &acut; into your editor, it replaces it with 
the right unicode character. Problem solved.

> type in the character's name if you can't easily type the character itself.

Why doesn't your editor do this?

> Unfortunately, rather than make this useful feature available to all XML
> applications, they arbitrarily chose to make it available to only one.

Because different XML applications need different character entities.

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

So always use UTF-8 or something. Or write your editor to recognize an XML 
header and parse it.

> 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...

But to *use* a DTD for a combination of trees, you have to implement an 
entire program to do so. So the actual concatenation of two files is rather 
simple, comparatively speaking.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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