4 ms·

Sort of related, could anyone please explain why there is a , named character reference in the HTML standard? https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/name

• toast0 3y ago
  Why not? There's lots of named characters in the range of 0x20-0x2F, and symbols in general.
  • ezequiel-garzon 3y ago
    Those symbols (including comma) were added in later editions of the standard, and I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems to me if your keyboard has the characters & and ; it will also have , no? I mean, why not add &a; for a then?
    • jwilk 3y ago
      There's also ";" standing for ";", which makes even less sense to me.
      • Izkata 3y ago
        To escape both special characters if you wanted to display ";" to the user?
      • marlin 3y ago
        In order to encode the ; as a character, when ; is being used as a separator.
• bruce343434 3y ago
  Perhaps for usage as an escaped form of `,` in comma separated value tables? Although good question why it's in the HTML spec, pasting raw csv inside of an element and then needing to read it back seems like a rare use case.
• whoopdedo 3y ago
  The now deprecated FONT FACE attribute was defined as a comma-separated list of names. The entity was needed if you had a font name with a comma in it. Another comma-separated list is in the TH|TD AXIS attribute which is considered obsolete now. I found two other CSL attributes in APPLET ARCHIVE (depr.) and AREA COORDS but neither of them need a comma entity. So the comma entity exists only as a historical artifact.
  • jwilk 3y ago
    Couldn't you use , instead?