(unknown charset) Re: ISO standards -- Was: True quotes (fwd)

Murray Altheim wrote:
>...
> In a sense, the SGML entity catalog is already part of HTML, being an
> application of SGML. But support for them in existing browsers will
> probably require more than simply recognition -- look to W3C's efforts in
> Web fonts for the ability to supply the hundreds of glyphs necessary.

The immediate frustration is the inability to specify glyphs that are
available on every graphics platform of which I'm aware. It seems to me
that, for a well-designed browser app, adding or changing
entity-name->glyph number entries should be incredibly trivial. We're
talking about a simple table look-up, aren't we? Why does MSIE 3 support
"™" but not "—", "–", and typographical quotes? All of
these characters have glyphs in PS and TT fonts, all have accepted
substitutes on a character display, and all but the dashes (why were these
ignored?) have established SGML names.

Note that all these characters have Unicode numbers in the 8000s--this is
not an excuse for ignoring them now.

Now that we've established that the entity names are established and that
an entity in a standard font character set can be supported regardless of
ISO or Unicode number, the question remains: "Why are browser builders
selectively ignoring some very important entities?"

David Perrell

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 1996 17:17:17 UTC