Re: German_Umlauts

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:

> 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 legacy degradation is pretty poor...

> 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.

I do think relying on an encoding is Bad Practice. It's raising the
legacy bar.

> Nobody would use &UpperCaseA; just to write an 'A', or would they?

actually, it has always bothered me that entities are case-sensitive;
Ö vs ö. Yes, it's an obvious mapping to the content, but
it just bugs me.

> >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 Dürst.

Beg to differ; how far can you trust context? imagine &emdash; versus
seeing a ?; it might be a smart quote or a dash of some length, hard
to be sure. I'd quite like browsers to display (or make it an option
to display) everything they don't understand, so that the reader will
not be misled.

L.

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

Received on Monday, 2 July 2001 14:40:41 UTC