- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charlesn@sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 20:11:39 +1000 (EST)
- To: WAI <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Interesting one for the guidelines. If the character set is clearly specified (I think the best way to do this is to use HTTP-EQUIV) then it <EM>should</EM> be fine to use the characters directly. When I am at home I use a system which uses 7-bit ASCII, and does not cope with the characters very well. This is a legacy problem, and I don't know how widespread it is. I know that when I am communicating with Scandinavians (I have an interest in Medieval Scandinavian History), especially Icelanders, I have problems. (So do they - hooked-o is not in ISO 8859-1, which is the most common character set I think). In general I would come down on the side of using the characters, but this is related to the 'ASCII art' guideline, because there are times when I would suggest using 'quoted-printable' techniques - for example the vietnamese character made of a letter a, with a circumflex or caret character (^) and an acute accent (') is represented in VNI (the common standard in Vietnam itself, although not outside it) as Ê (A capital E with a circumflex/caret) in ISO 8859-1. If I were at home I would get something else again. It was common to use a^' or a+^' to represent this character on 7-bti ASCII based systems. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for blind users - one problem may be a lack of appropriate software to map the characters properly. This is where the i18n activity seems to cross over the WAI. Also, In an ideal world, authoring tools would allow switching between characters and entitiy representations. But we don't live in one. just some thoughts Charles McCathieNevile On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Kristopher Walmsley wrote: > The Institute on Independent Living has certain sections of the site > translated to Swedish. > > My question: In writing meta-tags; table summaries; image ALT > descriptions, etc. do I need to use the ISO-8859 entity for the Swedish > characters (i.e. ä) or can I just write the character as it appears > (ä - "a" with an umlaut)?
Received on Thursday, 27 August 1998 06:34:54 UTC