Re: Charsets: Problem statement/requirements?

Bob Jung (bobj@netscape.com)
Wed, 8 Feb 95 22:46:47 EST

At 9:06 PM 2/8/95 -0500, Joe English wrote:
>How should numeric character references (&#nnn;)
>be interpreted in text/html; charset=something-other-than-latin1 ?
>
>What if the MIME charset= parameter specifies
>a multibyte encoding?

I believe these should be treated as a byte value in the
"charset=something-other-than-latin1" encoding. If the content
developer wants to specifiy a multibyte character, use something like:

&#nnn&#nnn

>Will this break the "Added Latin 1 for HTML" entity set,
>which uses numeric character references to define all
>the entities?

These should continue to work if the charset is Latin1 (default charset).

>(Proposed solution: state that "The implied SGML declaration
>used for HTML documents with a 'charset' parameter other than
>the default shall be chosen or constructed by the receiving party
>in an implementation-specific manner. Therefore the use of numeric
>character references in such documents is strongly discouraged."

Yes, we should strongly discourage this practice!

>OK, so that's pretty weak...)
>
>
>--Joe English
>
> joe@trystero.art.com

-bob

Bob Jung bobj@netscape.com +1 415 528-2688, fax +1 415 528-4122
Netscape Communications Corp. 501 E. Middlefield Mtn View, CA 94041