Re: iso 8859 or escape sequencies?

Ari Luotonen (luotonen@ptsun00.cern.ch)
Mon, 11 Apr 94 22:37:06 +0200


> |Is there a reason to use the html "escape-sequencies" (&oumlaut for |
> |etc.) for characters that are also in the iso 8859-1 character-set? Are
> |there browswers that do not support the full iso8859 character set but
> |do support the escape-sequencies?
> | -Timo H
>
> There are several reasons:
>
> - On many computers Latin-1 is not the default character set, so codes
> above 127 would be mapped incorrectly.

In countries needing Latin-1 characters there is usually no problem.
If they don't show up correctly on the other side of the world who
cares -- they wouldn't understand it anyway. Mosaic supports it ok,
I guess Lynx works just fine if the terminal understands them, so
my advise would be to use Latin-1. I mean those ampersand things
make the source text look like hell, and currently it is still the
poor human-beings writing it with Emacs, not some HiTech HTML editors.

> - Using the SGML entities ensures that the file can be e-mailed (see
> what became of your &oumlaut; above...)

The guy designing these SGML entities was clearly someone whose mother
tongue didn't contain any of them. Imagine what a pain it would be to
always type '&blaa;' instead of 'a' and '&bloo;' instead of 'o'. This
text would look mighty horrible, never mind if I can email it. (BTW,
ö doesn't map to | if you clear the high-order bit, it's just
something he typed in because scandinavian terminals can be configured
to show the (7bit) pipe char as ö).

> - Browsers that cannot display the characters, can -- in principle --
> approximate them.

Well, none of them do. And this is the 90's, machines should have
those characters and not just approximate them.

-- Cheers, Ari "why-does-this-gimme-an-open-brace-when-I-wanna-have-an-ä-my-emacs-setup-sucks-or-is-it-this-damn-window-system" Luotonen --