Characters in range 128-159, incl.

Stan Newton (newtonjs@char.vnet.net)
Wed, 25 Jan 95 10:05:01 EST

Dear Murray,

Since you are very knowledgable about character sets and have indicated a
willingness to help those more in the dark....

Truetype fonts in Windows use the character range of 128-159 for several
'publishing' type characters, particularly the various single and double
smart quotes. As a result, I am receiving files from Windows users for
conversion into HTMl documents which contain characters in this range and I
don't know what to do about them.

Should I...
Disallow them entirely since the HTML 2.0 spec says they are unused?
Disallow would have to mean either substitute some other acceptable
character on a case by case basis or remove entirely.

Escape them using a numeric escape sequence like &146;? Since the spec
doesn't specifically allow this numeric value (UNUSED remember), it would
not seem to be valid. But I tried it in SpyGlass and NCSA Mosaics and it
worked (i.e. was converted to the proper character) in both cases. This may
not be true of other browsers.

I'm trying to produce compliant HTML 2.0 documents but I'm struggling with
this one.

Can you please help?

Stan Newton
Newton Computing Solutions