[whatwg] HTML5 named entity ≫ and ≪

Mike Samuel mikesamuel at gmail.com
Wed Dec 14 09:18:30 PST 2011


The table in section 12.5 (
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/named-character-references.html
) says
> GT;    U+0003E        >
> Gt;    U+0226B        ≫
> gt;    U+0003E        >
> GT     U+0003E        >
> gt     U+0003E        >

which I believe means that ">", ">","&GT", and "&gt" all encode
">" but "≫" encodes U+226B MUCH GREATER-THAN.

http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps/entities-unicode.inc includes these but
the entities-legacy.inc does not.

Similarly

> Lt;    U+0226A        ≪

This is a potential source of confusion for naive HTML entity decoders
fall-back to case-insensitive matching when there is no mapping for a
given entity name.

MathML already has other succinct mappings for U+226A (≪) and
U+226B (≫).  Could HTML5 avoid confusion by deprecating ≪ and
≫ in favor of ≪ and ≫ or remove them entirely?

http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=≫%20file:.html$%20case:yes&type=cs
shows four files using "≫", 2 of which treat it as synonymous with ">".


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