Re: Problem: incompatible handling of svg files

[<br...@ph...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 October 2006 01:43 pm, Hans-Bernhard Br=C3=B6ker wrot=
e:
>> 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.
>=20
> I understand. The specific question remains as to whether the XML t=
ag
> "encoding=3D'foo'" at the head of a document is mandated to apply
> or not apply to octal/hex constants. =20

What you call octal/hex constants, XML calls a "character reference".=
=20
And the paragraph of the XML spec the URL above points says quite=
=20
straightforwardly that such references specify a Unicode code point.

> We may need a provision to allow people to pass a Unicode sequence
> as a hex code rather than as raw UTF-8 bytes:
> =09set title "This is a Unicode right arrow: &#x21d2 "
> In this case you don't want that & character replaced by &

It boils down to this question: do we treat SVG like TeX, or like any=
=20
other dumb format?  In the former case, we should document that & is =
an=20
escape character in text strings that go to the SVG driver.  It may e=
ven=20
be necessary to offer quoting & characters (so the above would become=
=20
"\&#x21d2" or '&#x21d2').