Re: euro entity

At 01:12 PM 14/10/98 -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>Liam Quinn wrote:
>> 
>> Due to a bug, Netscape 4.x will not correctly display any character that
>> cannot be encoded in the document's character encoding (or something close
>> to that--Netscape 4.x on Windows seems to handle windows-1252 encodable
>> characters as numeric references in an ISO-8859-1 encoded document).  So if
>> you serve a document with charset=ISO-8859-1, Netscape won't show €
>> correctly.
>
>I tested € with iso-8859-1 and windows-125[0-4], and they all
>worked on NT4 with Communicator 4.5. 4.06 should work too, though I
>haven't tried it recently.

Perhaps it's a Win95 problem then.  I tested with Navigator 4.5b2 and 4.07
on Win95 and just got a square with the Times New Roman font.  IE5 gives me
the euro with Times New Roman for € and &#x20AC (though IE 5.0b1
doesn't support €).  (According to
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/faq/faq12.htm>, NT's Service Pack 4
includes updated codepages for the euro, but there are no updated codepages
for Win95 that I can find.)

As for the bug I mentioned, compare the following two URLs:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.html
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.utf8

The two pages are exactly the same except for the charset parameter sent;
the former is served with charset=ISO-8859-1 while the latter is served
with charset=UTF-8.  IE (5.0b1, Win95) gets most of the Greek characters
right for both pages, but Netscape (4.5b2, Win95) only shows the Greek
letters on the UTF-8 version.  With the ISO-8859-1 version, Netscape only
shows the windows-1252 characters properly.  The results are the same even
when I change my Western font to Bitstream Cyberbit (which I use as my
Unicode font).

Here's another source that mentions the bug:

"Netscape browsers, even version 4, fail to render most of the unicode
characters represented by &#bignumber; unless the advertised charset
implies unicode. This is a bug, but can be circumvented in an entirely
standards-conforming way by advertising the charset as utf-8."
(http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/charset/quick.html#cons)

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Wednesday, 14 October 1998 20:45:59 UTC