Re: German_Umlauts from Martin Duerst on 2001-07-02 (www-validator@w3.org from July 2001)

From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2001 15:50:56 +0900
To: Lloyd Wood <L.Wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>, Liam Quinn <liam@htmlhelp.com>
Cc: Rainer Ziener <ziener@tls-tautenburg.de>, www-validator <www-validator@w3.org>, mrengel <mrengel@tls-tautenburg.de>
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.J.20010702154612.02ee5e70@sh.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>

At 17:11 01/06/30 +0100, Lloyd Wood wrote:
>On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Liam Quinn wrote:
>
> > There's nothing wrong with using the 8-bit ISO-8859-1 encoding of a letter
> > with an umlaut as long as you specify your charset as ISO-8859-1.
>
>but if you can, surely using available &entity; increases
>understandability for displays using other charsets?

Good browsers now display an enormous number of scripts and
characters, and get better and better. And the number of
browsers that don't support iso-8859-1 (when properly told
that the file is in that encoding) is extremely small.
So using entities should really not be necessary.
Nobody would use &UpperCaseA; just to write an 'A', or would they?

>Even if they
>don't translate it but display it raw, the reader has a chance to
>figure out meaning.

For the Latin-1 case, which is covered by the character entities
in HTML, guessing D?rst (or just reading over it) is in most cases
easier than reading D&uuml;rst. For other cases, there are no
character entities to start with.

Regards,    Martin.

Received on Monday, 2 July 2001 03:00:04 UTC