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Comment by ezequiel-garzon | Hacker News Reader

Sort of related, could anyone please explain why there is a , named character reference in the HTML standard?

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/named-characters.html...

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.

Couldn't you use , instead?

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.

Why not? There's lots of named characters in the range of 0x20-0x2F, and symbols in general.

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?

There's also "&semi;" standing for ";", which makes even less sense to me.

To escape both special characters if you wanted to display "&semi;" to the user?

In order to encode the ; as a character, when ; is being used as a separator.

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