Re: char set encodings

On Fri, 24 May 1996, Martin J Duerst wrote:

> Definitely the "charset", which is a well used but very inappropriate
> name in MIME to denote encodings of characters. Please don't use
> fonts to switch between different encodings, it might work in some
> cases, but will give you big headaches in the future.

You have to define the proper font for each encoding for netscape 
schema to work. If you have font for the encoding installed
and you have define which font will each encoding use
in the General Preferences - selecting different document encoding
will change the font also.

> It may be nice help to the user that Netscape supports
> x-mac-ce, but please help everywhere to do what fortunately
> has worked for Western Europe, namely that only one single
> encoding (i.e. "charset") is used. Different platforms currently
> still use different local encodings, but for the web, it does
> not help to just use your local "charset", or the one you
> think might be most popular on target machines. The only
> good solution is to stick to very few widely usable sets.
> For Central Europe, this clearly would be iso-8859-2, as
> it is iso-8859-1 for Western Europe (you don't have to
> indicate this, as it is the default).

What does it mean - Netscape support x-mac-ce encoding?
As i know Netscape for X and Win95 supports  
charset only if you have a proper font for that charset.
I ve heard that this is different on Mac, and
that on the Mac Netscape uses Macintosh font which
is in mac-western or mac-ce charset to display
iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-2 documents.
He has to do on-the-fly conversion from
one charset to another.

But on the X and win95 he will not make
any conversion. Only thing that he will do
is to choose which font will be used to
display document, depending on document header or 
this META tag, or he will use OUR default encoding.
(Not ISO-8859-1 but the one that we select before
saying Save Options.)

So as far as X and Win95 are concerned Netscape does not
support mac-ce encoding. Or am i wrong???

The other part of the story is that with Netscape
like that you simply CANT use iso-8859-2 encoding on windows
if you don't have iso-8859-2 font which is different from 
windows CE font. This is a real nightmare for multiplatform
users because X windows can't read win ce, and win95
users can't read iso-8859-2.

I saw Central European (Win) and
Central European (ISO) doument encoding in
Atlas Netscape Preview.
Does this means that Netscape on Win95 will
also support on the fly conversion from iso-8859-2
to Windows CE.

And finally a question for all users in western europe
How do you deal with difference between 
ISO-8859-2 and 1252 code pages.
I think of missing oe letter in iso-8859-1 code page.
Is this a problem when you exchange docs 
from windows to X windows.

Best regards
Dean.

Received on Friday, 24 May 1996 09:25:19 UTC