Re: Greek encoding help wanted

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, William Breuer wrote:

> I've got the same error on my pages...

Same as what? Please quote or paraphrase what you are commenting on.

> Example url: http://www.woordenboekjes.nl/winkel/titel/Bulgaars

You get "non SGML character number 128". What is your problem with that,
after reading the explanation after it? (The explanation is somewhat 
confused, as almost anything written about character codes, but it's 
still reasonably understandable and correct.)

> The only symbol where the validator says there is a error is on the euro 
> sign.

No, it reports the octet 128 (decimal) as error. In the encoding that
your server declares in HTTP headers, iso-8859-1, it means nothing - it is 
in the area reserved for control characters. Most browsers assume that the 
declaration of iso-8859-1 was incorrect and apply windows-1252 instead, 
but it's unwise to rely on such behavior.

> I know it's possible to replace it by €, but I guess if people use 
> machines that don't support the direct character request, the € won't 
> help also.

Browsers that don't recognize € are rare these days (you would have 
to go down to something like Netscape 4). Besides, seeing € displayed 
literally isn't that bad - it's not optimal browsing experience but it 
gives the idea of what is meant, and nobody expects optimal browsing 
experience when using Netscape 4 these days.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 20 January 2006 09:19:08 UTC