I cannot imagine using &#3F; instead of simply "?" in a document.  Who has
the time to maintain all of those symbols?  In my seven years of doing this
stuff, I've never have even thought to try.

My general rule of thumb is that everything I can type on my keyboard is a
valid character (with the obvious exceptions of < and >).  I only go to
entity names when it is outside that range, and only to entity numbers when
my references tell me the names are not standard.

I tried to check the W3C docs for more "official" guidance, but I couldn't
find it quickly (other than a list of entities at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html) so I'll leave it to a
standards guru to fill us in.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Mount, Software Engineer            steve(at)saltyrain.com
Home Site                            http://www.saltyrain.com
US Constitution Online          http://www.usconstitution.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shelley Watson" <shelley(at)internavigate.com>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2002 1:50 PM
Subject: use of character entities


> Dear Folks
>
> Anyone have up-to-date info regarding the use of character entities within
> an html document?  I use them, however sometimes clients are adding text
to
> sites I've constructed and although I've given them a list of character
> entities to utilize, they forget or don't use them.  Also, I use the
> numerical equivalents, i.e. numerical entities rather than the "character"
> entity (.&#34; as opposed to &quot).  I've also read that it's not
necessary
> to utilize entities for quotation marks, apostrophe, question mark, etc.,
> i.e., the more common punctuation marks in usage.  Any comments?

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