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Re: £ converted into £,   converted into ~

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:21:57 +0100
Message-ID: <489489A5.1050009@googlemail.com>
To: John Stumbles <amaya@yaph.org.uk>
CC: www-amaya@w3.org

John Stumbles wrote:

> Is Amaya supposed to do this (is the &escape; syntax now deprecated -
> I'm a bit out of touch with current HTML standards in which case how
> should I get pound signs and non-breaking spaces that render properly on
> a web browser?

The &escape; syntax is not deprecated:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.3

I suppose Amaya may be saving the document with a character encoding 
that includes those characters and where they do not need to be escaped.

Subject to font support, you get special characters to render properly 
in HTML by doing /all/ of the following:

1. Saving or generating HTML in a given character set (commonly 
ISO-8859-1, but ideally UTF-8 without a Byte Order Mark, since that 
includes all unicode characters and means you only need to escape & < > 
' and ", which have a special meaning as HTML syntax).

2. Having your HTML document declare its character set with a HTTP 
header equivalent in a META element:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.2.2

3. Most importantly, if the document is being served by a webserver, you 
must ensure your server declares the character set of the HTML document 
with a real HTTP content-type header when it serves it:

http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Saturday, 2 August 2008 16:22:36 GMT

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