- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 05:35:21 -0500 (EST)
- To: Jens Meiert <jens.meiert@erde3.com>
- Cc: lisa seeman <seeman@netvision.net.il>, y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
The default character set for HTML is undefined, and the HTML spec says "user agents must not assume any default" -- http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.2 HTTP claims that the default is iso-8859-1 - which is a pain, because for XML the default is Unicode. This sets up a conflict :( This is a slightly messy issue, but it is possible to determine that characters outside the range of a particular language are being used. HTML allows user agents to guess that character set, without specifying any set of reasonable guesses. Unfortunately most people get it wrong, asserting for example that American english can be written in ASCII (which is false), and the tools are still not that great either. I hope Richard Ishida or someone very versed in these issues can help clarify. Cheers Chaals On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Jens Meiert wrote: > >> In Hebrew (for once ) this is easy. >> A foreign word is written in a different character set. > >CMIIW, but since the UCS (Universal Character Set, often referred to as >Unicode) is the document character set for HTML/XML, they (foreign words) ain't >written in a different character set. > >Again referring to to John (see my last post [1]) I claim this is an issue >where unimpaired users are affected as well. Also, I don't see any need for >ruling language use by the WAI WG (there already was such a discussion a few >months ago [2] ;). > > >All the best, > Jens. > > >[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2004JanMar/0169.html >[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2003OctDec/0411.html > > >-- >Jens Meiert >Interface Architect > >http://meiert.com/ > Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles tel: +61 409 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22 Post: 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia or W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2004 05:36:05 UTC