Re: [VE][139] New Error Message Suggestion

On Wed, 19 May 2004, Scott R. Godin wrote:

> On Wed, 19 May 2004, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> 
> > * Scott R. Godin wrote:
> >> I'm afraid I don't understand.. you're saying that the entity – is
> >> not part of ISO-8859-1 ?
> >
> > The character – represents is not, please have a look at
> > <http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/iso8859/isotable.html>.
> 
> Thanks Bjoern, appreciate your responses.
> 
> I'm mildly surprised that it is not, considering it's a bog-standard 
> typographical mark.

You can use "&ndash;" with any character encoding.  The problem was that
your document used the byte 0x96 instead of "&ndash;".

> I've experimented with the validator and decided on windows-1250 as per 
> your earlier suggestion

His earlier suggestion was windows-1252, not windows-1250.

> Why does this make me feel like I'm kowtowing to Microsoft (again)? :|

You can avoid that feeling if you use "&ndash;" or "&#8211;" instead of 
the byte 0x96.

> Why does this typographical mark work with the windows-specific charset, 
> but none of the international ones? (not even part of UTF-8) *sigh*

The byte 0x96 is the representation of the en dash in windows-1250 and 
windows-1252.  In UTF-8, the en dash is represented differently.  To avoid 
such confusion, you could use "&ndash;" or "&#8211;", which is independent 
of the character encoding.

> ok, using the windows-1250 charset, some font-sizes on the site change; in 
> particular the smallest fonts just got smaller, and the charset change was 
> the ONLY change made. To double-check this, I altered it back to 
> iso-8859-1 and tested again, and the small footer fonts are back to their 
> normal chosen size.

Your browser is likely taking the windows-1250 charset as a hint to switch
to a font that contains glyphs for most of the characters in windows-1250.

> pardon me for living, but isn't THAT something that shouldn't happen?

Seems reasonable to me if your default font doesn't contain glyphs for 
most characters in windows-1250.  Otherwise, the browser would be more 
likely to require font changes within words, which is rather ugly.

Windows-1250 is intended for Eastern European languages.  Windows-1252 is 
intended for Western European languages.

> I'm more confused now than before, but I'm not about to go back and rework 
> all the fontsizes so I can live with windows-1250

Your site's design should handle different fonts and font sizes.

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Wednesday, 19 May 2004 21:36:21 UTC