[Whatwg] IE-only character entity references

[Philip Taylor]

IE undocumentedly recognises some which nobody else does:

aafs    U+206D  ACTIVATE ARABIC FORM SHAPING
ass     U+206B  ACTIVATE SYMMETRIC SWAPPING
iafs    U+206C  INHIBIT ARABIC FORM SHAPING
iss     U+206A  INHIBIT SYMMETRIC SWAPPING
lre     U+202A  LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING
lro     U+202D  LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE
nads    U+206E  NATIONAL DIGIT SHAPES
nods    U+206F  NOMINAL DIGIT SHAPES
pdf     U+202C  POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING
rle     U+202B  RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING
rlo     U+202E  RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE
zwsp    U+200B  ZERO WIDTH SPACE

(I believe that list is complete.)

The first eleven were suggested on
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9605&L=html-wg&P=4579 some
time ago but don't seem to have gone very far (except into IE).

I can see some legitimate users at
<http://www.tasb.com/services/field/staff/index.aspx?print=true> and
<http://www.pelesoft.co.il/> and maybe there's a few dozen or hundred
more elsewhere (but I can't measure it easily). There's some in
text-art at <http://yy28.60.kg/test/read.cgi/maido3/1096370177/l50>
and quite a lot in weird places like
<http://cheese.2ch.net/life/kako/1010/10103/1010391447.html> or
<http://zerosen52.gozaru.jp/log/1093422333.html> that I don't
understand but that seem to all be on 2channel (or copied from it).
I've no idea how common they are in general.

Are these used significantly on the web, or would they be considered
highly useful if anyone knew they existed, or should HTML5 just ignore
them?

-- 
Philip Taylor
excors at gmail.com