Ruby Forum Redcloth > Plan for entities and code blocks

I should have posed my questions about entities and escaped
characters in code blocks as a proposal with which you could
disagree. :-)

Unless someone brings up a good reason to do otherwise, I'm going to
leave entities in their existing form (e.g. &lt; for <) and not
convert single and double quotes to entities within code blocks.
This represents a departure from Textile 2.  I plan to change the
Threshold State test cases accordingly.

Jason

Jason Garber wrote:
> This represents a departure from Textile 2.

Out of curiosity, do you know why Textile 2 made the choice it did
for rendering character entities?  Was there some compelling design
criteria involved?

-- John

>
> Out of curiosity, do you know why Textile 2 made the choice it did  
> for rendering character entities?  Was there some compelling design  
> criteria involved?
>
> -- John

Just some speculation...

one of the seminal articles on character entities -- the ALA trouble
with ems and ens -- said decimal entities (—, etc) were more
reliably rendered. It didn't give much detail on why named entitles were
unreliable, only mentioning that netscape 4 had issues with named
entities.  That article is why I (and lots of others, I assume) have
always used numerical entities.

Maybe that's why textile 2 chose numbered entities too?

anyway, my 2 cents -- I assume modern browsers render all the named
entitles correctly... so i'd agree with Jason for going with named
entitles, for readability anyway.

david

I didn't have any idea, John.  Thanks for shedding some light on it,
David.

Jason