Re: Problem: incompatible handling of svg files

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 17 October 2006 01:43 pm, Hans-Bernhard Br=C3=B6ker wrote:
> Ethan Merritt wrote:
> > I have not been able to find any statement about this
> > in the svg standards pages on www.w3.org.
>
> That's probably because this is not a property of SVG, but one of XML
> in general.  See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-references
> ISO/IEC 10646 is what most people got to know as "Unicode".  UTF-8 is
> one way of encoding such characters.

I understand. The specific question remains as to whether the XML tag
"encoding=3D'foo'" at the head of a document is mandated to apply
or not apply to octal/hex constants.  We observe that it doesn't,
but do not know whether this is expected behaviour or a faulty
implementation in the browser plugins.

> The original problem is that '&' and '<' characters were passed
> unmodified into the output stream, where they can create no end of
> problems.  There was code to encode them as "entities" ('&amp;' and
> '&lt;' respectively), but this was only applied for enhanced SVG.

OK.  Then I will commit the simpler of the 2 test versions,
with no special handling of UTF-8.  It maintains the & and <
treatment you describe for both normal and enhanced text. =20

We may need a provision to allow people to pass a Unicode sequence
as a hex code rather than as raw UTF-8 bytes:
	set title "This is a Unicode right arrow: &#x21d2 "
In this case you don't want that & character replaced by &amp;

I predict many queries in the future about setting up UTF-8 fonts
correctly, but font queries seem inevitable in any case.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA