Re: iso 8859 or escape sequencies?

luotonen@ptsun00.cern.ch (Ari Luotonen)
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Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 22:39:20 --100
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From: luotonen@ptsun00.cern.ch (Ari Luotonen)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: iso 8859 or escape sequencies?
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>  |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,
&ouml; 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 &ouml;).


> - 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-&auml;-my-emacs-setup-sucks-or-is-it-this-damn-window-system" Luotonen --