Re: Assistance w/charset

At 6:29 pm -0400 19/4/00, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>On my machine under NT 4.0, both MSIE 5.01 and Netscape 6 display
>ρ correctly.  Since Netscape 6 is based on the Mozilla code, I
>suspect that browser would work correctly as well providing the
>glyph was available on the OS.  It did take them a while, but they
>seem to have gotten around to doing it right.

I'll believe it when I see it.  I have just rendered a site in UTF-8. 
Netscape 4 on NT understood nothing.  As to IE5, the characters 
showed fine on the Mac when served locally but served by a UNIX 
server the characters were converted twice it seems.  I eventually 
solved the problem so far as IE 5 goes by using UNICODE-2-0-UTF-7. 
So far I have had no complaints and the encodinmg is quite 
transparent on both Mac and NT 4.

Viewing the source in IE for Windows, the raw utf7 is visible, but on 
the Mac the built-in source viewer translates utf-7 to utf-8; to see 
the source properly, the file needs to be opened in a text editor. 
Out of curiosity I also viewed the site using IE 3.0 for Mac and was 
impressed with how well it did.  All the styling is in an external 
style sheet and jet IE 3 showed nearly all the styles correctly. 
though it could not deal with the utf-7.

As to Netscape, it understands none of it and spews out the raw code. 
Interestingly I went to the Netscape garage to have the site checked 
out and received a glowing report that declared the html to be 
"excellent" -- pity you have to have IE 5 to view it and also a pity 
that you can't get to the garage unless you use Netscape because of 
some "known problem with IE 4.0 on Macintosh computers" that has been 
know and not fixed for the best part of a year at least.

Even a one-man show like iCab on the Mac can interpret UNICODE in all 
its guises, so what on earth is Netscape doing?  Every time I free up 
some disk space to download their latest effort I can guarantee to 
have that disk space back within a few days because Netscape _always_ 
ends up in the trash.

JD

Received on Tuesday, 25 April 2000 12:31:58 UTC