Re: character codes and repeated link phrase questions

Jamie Mackay <Jamie.Mackay@cultureandheritage.govt.nz> wrote:

> I have come across a dilemma trying to make a page conform to XHTML Strict.
> I am not allowed to use Decimal Codes as they are not considered valid SGML

If you are talking about numeric character references, that's part of
the XML 1.0 Recommendation, thus can be used in XHTML, too.

> - so, for example,  instead of &#150; for an endash I am supposed to use
> &ndash; .

&#150; is definitely incorrect; decimal code point 150 (U+0096) in
ISO/IEC 10646 / Unicode is "START OF GUARDED AREA", which is part of
C1 controls.  Real "EN DASH" is &#8211; (&#x2013;).

In some character encoding schemes, such as windows-1252, code
position 150 happens to correspond to endash, but numeric character
references must always be interpreted according to code points in
ISO/IEC 10646 / Unicode, regardless of character encoding schemes.

> All fine and dandy, until I render the page in Netscape 4 which
> just spells out the code rather than providing the endash. Is there a
> solution to this that works across browsers?

&#8211; would work across various browsers, including Netscape 4.

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Tuesday, 23 January 2001 16:53:05 UTC