Re: OOPS! META got promoted; why did nbsp go away?

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Tue, 11 Oct 1994 09:36:03 -0500

In message <9410110955.aa23423@dali.scocan.sco.COM>, Murray Maloney writes:
>When I was putting together the write-ups on character data
>and entities, I tried each of the character positions and
>discovered that neither &nbsp; nor &#160; worked in the
>browser that I was using (Mosaic 2.4).

Sheesh... in fact, this is the case. I can't figure out why character
160 doesn't act like a non-breaking space in Mosaic: from what I can
tell, you'd have to write special code to break this feature. Maybe
the X font metrics are funky or something...

> The upper 128 positions include a non-breaking space,
> a soft hyphen indicator, 93 graphical characters, 8
> unassigned characters, and 25 control characters.
> <I>The non-breaking space and soft hyphen indicator are
> not recognized and interpreted by all HTML browsers, and
> their use is discouraged. </I>

I suppose this is accurate. The part in <i>'s should end up looking
like the other "NOTE: some browsers are busted" messages.

ISO8859-1 was specified as the HTML characters set back in 1993, before
Mosaic was implemented. So this is just a plain bug.

The &nbsp; markup, on the other hand, was introduced fairly recently,
and it's not really a "bug" if a browser doesn't support it -- until
2.1 comes along.

Dan