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Re: seeking webguru advice on html character encoding
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Re: seeking webguru advice on html character encoding


  • Subject: Re: seeking webguru advice on html character encoding
  • From: Arthur J Knapp <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:20:10 -0500

> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 15:36:18 +0000
> From: has <email@hidden>
> Subject: seeking webguru advice on html character encoding


> I'm working on a spanking new library for encoding ascii characters as html
> character entities. I'm wondering if there's anyone who knows about
> character sets, fonts and html character entities for discussing how to
> handle some of the more awkward stuff.

> ... I'm avoiding some of the obvious
> pratfalls (none of this &#150;/&#151; for en/em dashes crap as in
> DreamWeaver, for example) but I'm lost elsewhere:

I'm sorry that you consider #150 and #151 to be "crap", but as a
website production guy, it's tough to find an alternative that
works in both Mac and Windows, Netscape and Microsoft, going back
to at least the level 3 browsers. Especially for much of the work
that we do, where "book" content is being transferred to the web.
It's hard to explain to a company like Prentice Hall that there is
no "formal, correct, legitemate" way to produce an en or em dash
that most browsers will render correctly.


> Characters that appear in Mac fonts but not in Windows fonts - I bet there
> are some, but what are they? Will a Windows-based browser make mince of
> them, or will it manage to render them ok? (Ditto Unix.) e.g. I know
> IE5/Mac handles things like &THORN; and &ETH; which aren't on my machine -
> how does it manage to do that?

It may be using "Symbol" font, which most people have on their machines.
Also, like any damn Microsoft product, IE5/Mac probably installed dozens
of it's own fonts without so much as a "by your leave..."

If you are creating a site that contains special math or logic symbols,
you often can rely on your audience having "Symbol" font. The only
problem is that, like any Windows & Mac font, the high-ascii characters
don't have a one-to-one corraspondence.


> What about <cough> "foreign" character sets - I'm woefully ignorant of any
> character set that doesn't speak in the Queen's English. How should I
> support them (since I don't want this thing to be English-only, if
> possible)?

You scoffed at DreamWeaver, but products like it and others, (BBEdit,
GoLive, etc), attempt to provide a subset of functionality that most
people's browsers can currently support.



{ Arthur J. Knapp, of <http://www.STELLARViSIONs.com>
<mailto:email@hidden>
try
<http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com/>
on error number -128
end try
}


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