Re: Charset "iso-10646-1"

From: Martin Duerst (duerst@w3.org)
Date: Wed, Aug 29 2001

  • Next message: Castro Escareno Guillermo: "Validator output should include number of errors..." 

    Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.J.20010829161151.0317cac0@mail.asahi-net.or.jp>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 16:19:52 +0900
To: John Middleton <jmiddlet@sedl.org>, www-validator@w3.org
From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Charset "iso-10646-1"

At 15:46 01/08/24 -0400, John Middleton wrote:
>Greetings,
>In attempting to build Spanish web pages I encountered a problem during 
>printing from (Netscape 4.x on Macintosh OS).  I found that Netscape (Mac) 
>would render the characters on screen, though would not print correctly 
>when using charset=iso-8859-1.
>I searched the web for other Spanish sites specifying a meta http-equiv 
>character set, unsuccessfully.
>
>I found charset=iso-10646-1  on W3C website 
>(http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/intro.html#h-2.3.1).

I'm a bit confused. The place you cite does reference [ISO10646], but it
does not contain any syntax examples. The actual syntax is given in
Section 5, http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html, but this does
not contain the label iso-10646-1 at all.

Also, the IANA registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
does not contain iso-10646-1.

I wonder where you came up with iso-10646-1.


>This seemed to fix the previous printing problem that correctly displays 
>and prints, however when validating at W3C I get the following error:
>----
>Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (HURLinux) mod_perl/1.21
>        Character encoding: iso-10646-1
>
>A fatal error occurred when attempting to transliterate the document 
>charset. Either we do not support this character encoding yet, or you have 
>specified a non-existent
>character encoding (typically a misspelling such as "iso8859-1" for 
>"iso-8859-1").
>
>The detected charset was "iso-10646-1".
>The error was "".

The last line is suboptimal, and should be fixed to actually say something.

>----
>QUESTION 1:
>I am writing asking those with more experienced if this character set 
>declaration is correct?
>I am wanting the Spanish language allowing the display of special 
>characters (eg. &iacute; and &ntilde;

If written that way, then these are independent of character encoding.
If actual byte values are used, my guess is that you are using iso-8859-1,
and if you do that, you should say so.

The printing problem is most probably a local problem. Printing
unfortunately is notoriously buggy on many browsers.

Regards,   Martin.


>) during printing.
>IE doesn't seem to have this problem.
>
>Also
>
>QUESTION 2:
>I assume I can validate such pages with "charset=iso-8859-1" then change 
>it to "charset=iso-8859-1" to assure conformance to W3C HTML.
>
>If you care to see a sample HTML page: 
><http://www.ncddr.org/temp/>http://www.ncddr.org/temp/
>
>Your time is respected and appreciated, thanks in advance.
>
>
>Best Regards,
>  John M.
>
>e-mail: jmiddlet@sedl.org
>
>PS. I am not subscribed to this list a response or guidance/reassurance 
>directly (via e-mail) is appreciated.