At 9:52 am +0100 3/3/04, Henrik Martensson wrote:
>On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 21:35, Andy Greener wrote:
> > I'd appreciate some advice on the following issues...
> >
>From your point of view, it should not matter how a character is
>represented. As long as all the different pieces of software in you
>application play by the rules, that is. They don't always do that...

Err, quite (see below)...

> >
>> I guess the fundamental question is: how are character entities
>> interpreted in relation to the document encoding (i.e. what's the
>> order of evaluation)? If that's not the fundamental question then
> > I'm missing something :-))
>
>I think a more important question is: why do you care? When your
>application uses the two different representations of a pound sign, in
>what way does the behavior of your application differ?

There are complexities I didn't go into, but basically there are two
different ways in, using two different parsers, and testing was
revealing 4 different outcomes (only one of which was the expected
successful acceptance of a pound sign) with the two alternate
representations!

Something is clearly broken (or at least it's clear now!) I let the
oddness of the test outcomes lull me into mistrust of what we'd been
doing, apparently successfully, all along up to this point....

Thanks to everyone who responded - I am a little older and a little
wiser :-)
-- 

Andy Greener                         Mob: +44 7836 331933
GID Ltd, Reading, UK                 Tel: +44 118 956 1248
andy@g...                       Fax: +44 118 958 9005