Re: Assistance w/charset

Charles.J.Driscoll@us.ul.com wrote:
> 
> Gentlemen;
> 
> Following a call to the W3C Administrator @ MIT, I was directed to submit
> this question via e-mail for the best response.
> 
> It's a simple question really, and here it is:
> 
> I'm presently putting together a presentation for our Intranet. In doing
> so, I have a need to utilize some Greek Characters (sigma, rho, tau,
> etc...) as well as horizontal & vertical "arrows".
> 
> As I am not a programmer by trade, and having read a little (HTML 4
> self-help type book) I believe I should be able to call the character sets
> defined in your document "Named character entities" accessible at your
> web-site ( http://www. w3.org/TR/WD-html140-970708/sgml/entities/html).

aka http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html

> I'm
> using Netscape 4.6 on Windows NT (& 4.7 on Windows 98)

That seems to be the problem. I find that Netscape 4.7 on Win98 doesn't
support all the characters listed in the HTML 4.0 spec. It displays
ρ as ρ and ρ as a ?.

Nor does IE 4.0. It's a little better: it treats them the same.
But it displays a little box (i.e. an unknown character thingy)
in both cases.

Nor does Opera 4.0. Same behaviour.

Amaya 2.4 does, though.
	http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

I believe that technically, this is an issue of quality of
implementation,
not of conformance. Displaying a ? or a box or ρ conforms
to the spec, I believe... yes; see:
	"5.4 Undisplayable characters"
	http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.4



> to develop the Web
> Pages with notepad.
> 
> This is where I hope you can help. Exactly how do I call the character set
> I want to use?

You don't need any <META> stuff; you're supposed to be able to just
write
	&rho;
or
	&#961;

but the implementations don't grok.

There's a nasty hack involving <font face="symbol">...</font>
and such, but if you want to do that sort of thing, I'll let
you figure it out. But I will provide a clue:
	http://www.w3.org/XML/9711theory/#lsl2html

> I've gone as far as viewing the referenced RFC2045 document
> on the web to call the "Arrow" and "Greek" subsets listed under "Named
> entities for symbols, mathematical symbols and Greek letters" (pages 3,4 &
> 5 of "Named character entities") via the following meta statement:
> 
> <META  http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset= XXXX">
> 
> where XXXX is actually one of the names I put in (ie: "ISO8859-1-1" or
> "greek" or "lat1" ,etc...)
> the name "Arrows" doesn't seem to work, so I have to assume I'm not calling
> it correctly.
> 
> In addition to telling me the correct call name, can you tell me if I can
> combine names (more than a single character set) within the same HTML body?
> 
> I'd appreciate it if you could have someone contact me as the time
> associated with my activity is quickly running out. Thank-you for you
> cooperation.
[...]

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 19 April 2000 12:26:36 UTC