Item 4. Use Standard Entity References
No reasonably sized keyboard could possibly include all the characters in Unicode. U.S. keyboards are especially weak when it comes to typing in foreign languages with unusual accents and non-Latin scripts. XML allows you to use either character references or entity references to address this problem. In general, named entity references like Ě should be preferred to character references like ě because they're easier on the human beings who have to read the source code.
While there are no standards for how to name these entity references, there are some useful entity sets bundled with XHTML, DocBook, and MathML. Since these are all modular specifications, you can even use the DTDs that define ...
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