Re: Screen readers and <<, <, >, >> characters from David Woolley on 2001-06-21 (w3c-wai-ig@w3.org from April to June 2001)

From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 22:34:43 +0100 (BST)
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Message-Id: <200106212134.f5LLYhg12917@djwhome.demon.co.uk>

> However, it does not recognize "&#139;" and "&#155;".

These are both illegal in HTML.  &#127; through &#159; are all illegal.

They result from poor authoring tools which assume that the reference
character set for HTML is Microsoft CP-1252, when it is actually
Unicode (or its ISO 8859/1 subset, in earlier versions), with the C1
control set excluded.

The correct HTML code for CP 1252 code point 139 is &#x2039; and
the correct HTML code for CP 1252 code point 155 is &#x203A;.  These
are SINGLE RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARKs, but I doubt if
the screen readers would know this.  There are proper arrow characters
but they are all presentational.

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2001 18:13:25 UTC