Next message: Liam Quinn: "RE: iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1"
Message-ID: <5DCA49BDD2B0D41186CE00508B6BEBD0022DAEB5@wdcrobexc01.ed.gov>
From: "Bailey, Bruce" <Bruce.Bailey@ed.gov>
To: "'Liam Quinn'" <liam@htmlhelp.com>
Cc: "'gerald et al.'" <www-validator@w3.org>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 09:20:28 -0400
Subject: RE: iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1
Dear Liam,
You are quite observant.
Please accept that for a certain minority of us, neutral apostrophes and
quotation marks (in proportional spaced fonts) are glaringly obvious,
intolerably ugly, and hallmarks of amateurishness. Some of this group, of
which I am not ashamed to be a member, refuse to write without them.
It was a result of off-list admonishment I got resulting from my post at
URL:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JulSep/0167.html>
that I started manually including the Windows charset statement. I believe
that "windows-1252" was not technically IANA approved at the time. Is it
approved now?
I understand that including the charset reference doesn't really make the
typographical apostrophe and quotation marks ’ “ ” that I
insist on using much more cross platform compatible, but in theory it could
help.
I am not about to start coding with 8-bit ASCII. That would make my content
LESS available even it made it more, strictly speaking, valid.
Until such time that Microsoft and Netscape have browsers that render <Q>
... </Q> properly, I will continue to use “ ... ” It can't be
that much of a big deal, AOL Press has handled <Q> ... </Q> properly for a
few years now! Once the school where I teach (and much of the rest of the
world) gives up on Navigator 4x, I will switch to “ and ” For
now, I believe quite fervently (and with defensible reason) that the “
... ” construct does the least harm!
Sincerely,
Bruce
P.S. I am loath to admit it, but if you or Gerald change your validators to
reject those characters, this would also prompt me to stop using them.
> ----------
> From: Liam Quinn
> Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 11:09 PM
> To: Bailey, Bruce
> Cc: 'gerald et al.'
> Subject: iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1
>
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Bailey, Bruce wrote:
>
> > Okay, here's a real issue: The W3C validator doesn't support
> > <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
> > charset=iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1">
> > and erroneous reports a "fatal error". That charset is valid and
> > registered, reference URL:
> > <http://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/character-sets>
> > One page, albeit modest, that uses this charset is at URL:
> > <http://www.cat.cc.md.us/~bbailey/>
> >
> > The WDG HTML Validator doesn't have this problem.
> > I believe the charset to be valid and I respectfully submit a request
> for
> > that character set. Please look into supporting it in the future.
>
> I'm not sure what the charset "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" really is.
> Because it was registered at IANA and "windows-1252" was not, many people
> believed that "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" was the official name for
> "windows-1252". I'm not sure if this belief is really correct, especially
> since "windows-1252" has since been registered separately at IANA.
>
> The WDG HTML Validator treats "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" as an alias
> for "windows-1252" at the moment, but I may remove
> "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" support altogether since I'm not sure
> that it is equivalent to windows-1252.
>
> If you switch to using "windows-1252" instead of
> "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1", then both validators will accept your
> page. However, many browsers outside of the Windows/Mac world do not
> support windows-1252, so your page would be more accessible if you stuck
> with ISO-8859-1.
>
> Your page includes "’", which is undefined (but not invalid)
> regardless of the charset. If you want to use windows-1252, you would use
> the byte 0x92 for the "smart" apostrophe. But I don't recommend doing
> this as it will fail to show on most platforms other than Windows and Mac.
>
> You're better off sticking with a normal apostrophe (').
>
> --
> Liam Quinn
>
>
>