Next message: Lloyd Wood: "Re: German_Umlauts"
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 17:08:46 +0100 (BST)
From: Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
To: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
cc: Rainer Ziener <ziener@tls-tautenburg.de>, www-validator@w3.org, mrengel@tls-tautenburg.de
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0106301700180.27030-100000@phaestos.ee.surrey.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: German_Umlauts
On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:
> At 06:51 01/06/28 -0400, Rainer Ziener wrote:
> >I am very interested to make all pages in correct HTML. Therefore I
> >use your validator.
> >My question concerns German Umlauts and other specicial characters.
> >For the normal ampersand the validator gives an error and I have to
> >write
> >& or &.
>
> You have to do that because otherwise it's difficult to
> distinguish a 'real' ampersand from an ampersand that
> starts something like & or &.
nicely self-referential, but not the clearest discussion of escape
codes I've ever seen... isn't it just mandatory on this list to cite
the relevant part of the validator FAQ?
& is the better choice, since it conveys meaning between different
character sets using different values for characters. (Having to write
£ for the UK pound sterling symbol in the absence of a meaningful
representation leads to confusion in character sets where char 163 is
something else.)
> >But if I write German Umlauts or so, the I donエt get
> >any error from the validator.
(smart quotes?)
> Why should you? An umlaut is not a special character.
Is your name really Duerst, or does the ue, as is common in
german, represent u with an umlaut?
In HTML I'd expect to see Dürst. I have a Turkish colleague whose
surname is Örs. You get the idea.
I don't think there's a symbol corresponding to the umlaut mark by
itself in most character sets (don't ask me about unicode).
tschuess,
L.
<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>