Well, our desire to get the named entity stems from two things, really 
(though I know at least one is taken care of by asp.net).   The first reason 
is that named entities are more portable in html when the web dev guys don't 
always dot their i's and cross their t's on the encoding declarations, and 
regular asp doesn't help.

Regular asp does not emit a Content-Type: ...;charset= declaration unless 
the asp page explicitly departs from the system default.  This has always 
created a portability/internationalization hole in asp.  Your average system 
default encoding will be windows-1252, but there's nothing in the response 
stream by default to give the receiving browser a hint what it's getting, so 
browsers not using the same default will sometimes get it wrong and the 
display comes out wonky when the literal characters are in there.  I've 
noticed that asp.net doesn't let any response go out without a ;charset= 
declaration, so that will help, but we're not in asp.net yet.

Yes, we could tell all of the web dev guys that *every* page has to include 
a <meta> header to declare the encoding, but they often forget and they don't 
test browsers with Korean, say, so we don't know a non-portable page has gone 
out until we get complaints.

In this environment, it would be nicer for the webdev guys writing xsl to be 
able to say   or « in their xsl and nicer if the html it generated also came 
out   or « in the output stream as well.  More portable, less open to 
internationalization problems.

The secondary desire is that it's just clearer.    is clearer to the 
entry-level webdev guy what's desired than   - this gets even more true when 
you're talking about the more obscure symbol entity declarations, like « («) 
or » (»).

I know that xml mantra is that an entity is a value and a value is an entity 
so it shouldn't matter whether the named entity, numeric entity, or literal 
char gets used in xsl, but the xml framework keeps encoding issues more in 
mind.  Html guys often forget.  I'm just trying to find tips and tricks to 
make it easier for them to make pages portable without adding a lot more 
steps for them, and getting named entities as output seems like it would make 
things easier on them.

I hope this at least explains the desire, even if there isn't an easy way to 
do it.

Thanks
_mark


"Martin Honnen" wrote:

> It seems even that the post is missing some stuff. I don't know of a way 
> to force MSXML to output entity references instead of the proper 
> character of instead of a proper numeric character reference.
> If you set
>    <xsl:output encoding="US-ASCII" method="html" />
> then I suppose you get numeric character references for anything not in 
> ASCII but I don't see why you would want that.