RE: SDATA or UNICODE

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Wed, 28 Jan 1998 14:13:13 -0800

At 04:10 PM 28/01/98 -0500, Gavin McKenzie wrote:
>On this issue of accessing characters that aren't in Unicode...
>
>XML provides a way for specifying the encoding of an entity with the
>?XML pi encoding declaration. Why wouldn't this be sufficient. If the
>euro or florin symbol is available in some non-Unicode character
>encoding scheme

Good idea, but it doesn't quite work. XML is very rigid in saying
that all the characters have to be Unicode characters (which the Euro
is quickly becoming). So let's take for an example the current
identifier of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Even if I have
an encoding in which this is available, say at code point 12352, that
doesn't make it into a Unicode character, or usable in XML.

Non-Unicode *encodings* are OK (e.g. ASCII). Non-Unicode *characters*
aren't. -T.