Re: What all does html support?

Larry Masinter writes:
> Yeeesh! No! Where's that rolled-up newspaper?
> 
> Rupesh Kapoor asked:
> >> Hi,
> >> 	It's amazing to find more syntax being supported by these browsers 
> >> each day. For instance, when I converted a MSWord document into text only 
> >> form today, was shocked to see netscape 1.0 correctly interpreting octal 
> >> codes like \225, \227 etc as bullets, regd & copyright symbols.
> >> 
> >> 	Can anyone supply me a pointer to the exact set of such symbols 
> >> supported by these browsers? Of particular interest are Mosaic & netscape 
> >> 1.{0,1}
> 
> And Bill Perry answered:
> >   This is generally a font issue - was this in windows netscape?  Try it
> > with netscape/X, and it might/might not work.  I hardcoded in a few
> > conversions for emacs-w3 based on the more popular ones people use from
> > windows fonts (quotes, cpoyright, registered, etc).
> 
> This isn't a _FONT_ issue, it is a _CHARACTER SET_ issue. HTML is
> normatively sent in ISO-8859-1, a character set that has several special
> characters in it. If you're building a browser that accepts HTML, you
> should do the best you can rendering ISO-8859-1 on the user's terminal,
> even if you don't have the right fonts. Similarly, if a server has
> documents written using something other than ISO-8859-1 (e.g., Macintosh
> character set) it should either _translate_ the document into the right
> character set or else _label_ it appropriately: content-type:
> text/html;charset="whatever"
> 

[...]

> (I'm getting on WMPerry's case because he's the implementor of the
> browser that _I_ use most frequently. :))

  I removed them for the next release.  Sheesh. :)

  What should the charset for the windows set be?

Content-type: text/html ; charset="broken-windows-shit"

  Seems good to me.

-Bill P.

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 1995 10:20:55 UTC