Thus wrote Rui Paulo:

> >    For portability reasons, I'd prefer use of either UTF-8 or XML
> > entities.
> 
> What portability reasons are you talking about ?

> > According to the NetBSD guide, XML entities are preferable to
> > national characters;
> >
> > http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/ap-contrib.html#ap-contrib-translating-writing-docbook

> Yes, but we were discussing if this is the correct way or not. It's
> PITA to write documentation using XML entities.

   Ah, yes - and as you wrote in an earlier message; leaving the
decision up to the people who's doing the actual work sounds like the
best idea. 
   Enforcing use of national characters isn't a good idea whilst XML
character entities are preferable in the sense of "portability" between
different languages and their corresponding character encodings, et
cetera.

   As for writing documentation using XML entities; there's simple
methods like editing the files with national characters and let sed
scripts convert the national characters back and forth to their
equivalent XML character entities.

   If it's worth the time and effort, perhaps the www team could
overlook the possibility of developing simple tools to simplify the
task of writing documents with XML entities in mind?
   On another note, has there been any discussions at all regarding use
of UTF-8 as a prefered character encoding for *all* documentation?

	-- ceh