Re: iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1

On 08.05.01 at 18:07, Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@asu.edu> wrote:

>>Also please note that this no longer applies in quite the same way when
>>you move to X(HT)ML.
>
>What changes, other than that the charset (i.e., encoding) defaults to
>UTF-8 vice ISO-8859-1?  Could you still use raw 8-bit Windows-1252
>declared as such (in both your XML declaration and a <meta http-equiv>)?

For XHTML 1.0 the situation is pretty much the same AFAICT; provided your
documents conform to the compatinility guidelines in Appendix C. For XML
the situation is probably more or less that UTF-8 is a minimum requirement
so using anything less is pointless. If your clients don't understand UTF-8
they probably have no use for the document in any case.

The real details of how this all works in the XML Age is a bit beyond me so
I'll have to punt on that. However, XML is a lot stricter in many areas so
there are likely some charset related issues there too. There is also
reining confusion over what MIME types should be used for XML, and,
depending on how that turns out to be resolved, we may no longer have the
embarrasing situation that the transport spec (HTTP) mandates a default
charset where the language spec (HTML) deprecates it.


>>I don't really see why the WCAG would say that [not to use Windows-1252]
>>as use of native charsets for the authoring or hosting platform are the
>>expected mode of operation.
>
>I don't think it violates the letter of any of the checkpoints, but it
>seems to go against the ideas of graceful transformation and platform
>nondependance, which underpin much of WCAG.

Hmmm. Maybe Björn or Sean can clarify a bit, but I don't really see any big
problems provided the charset used is duly registered with IANA and marked
as suitable for use as a MIME encoding. If this was a real problem, it
should be covered in the HTML spec by mandating a specific encoding
(UTF-8/UTF-16) and not in WCAG (IMO, obviously).


>That's a bit O/T for the validator list, though.

Not really. We do hope to add WCAG-style checking as an optinal extra
feature if the Validator at some point (Nick Kew has even made some very
interesting suggestions on how it could be done and is IIRC experimenting
with them in his excellent Site Valet service
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>).

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 21:32:32 UTC