Re: accented characters, etc.

At 10:52 am +0000 2/12/99, Sean Healy wrote:
>I'm new to the list, and I didn't see anything like this in the archives for the last few months, so here goes:
>
>The current list of accented letters available in HTML isn't nearly enough.  Is it possible to put an overstrike tag in the next version that will allow authors to specify two (or more) characters to place overtop each other.  There is something similar with the strikeout tag that places a line through letters.  Perhaps something like <OS>~n</OS> could replace &ntilde; (for those of you with HTML-enabled readers, &lt;OS&gt;~n&lt;/OS&gt; and &amp;ntilde;).  This would be a big step toward true internationalization.

No such thing is needed; the big step towards internationalization is already taken and it is Unicode <http:www.unicode.org/>.  All you need to do is declare UTF-8 as your character set and use unicode entities such as &x03EE; for your characters, bearing in mind that people using older system software and browsers will not be able to interpret them.

Without going so far as using Unicode, you can also declare some other character set such as iso-8858-2 and use decimal or hexadecimal character entities, eg. &#131;  &x83;


JD

Received on Thursday, 2 December 1999 18:16:18 UTC