iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Bailey, Bruce wrote:

> Okay, here's a real issue:    The W3C validator doesn't support
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
> charset=iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1">
> and erroneous reports a "fatal error".  That charset is valid and
> registered, reference URL:
> <http://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/character-sets>
> One page, albeit modest, that uses this charset is at URL:
> <http://www.cat.cc.md.us/~bbailey/>
>
> The WDG HTML Validator doesn't have this problem.
> I believe the charset to be valid and I respectfully submit a request for
> that character set.  Please look into supporting it in the future.

I'm not sure what the charset "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" really is.
Because it was registered at IANA and "windows-1252" was not, many people
believed that "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" was the official name for
"windows-1252".  I'm not sure if this belief is really correct, especially
since "windows-1252" has since been registered separately at IANA.

The WDG HTML Validator treats "iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" as an alias
for "windows-1252" at the moment, but I may remove
"iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1" support altogether since I'm not sure
that it is equivalent to windows-1252.

If you switch to using "windows-1252" instead of
"iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1", then both validators will accept your
page.  However, many browsers outside of the Windows/Mac world do not
support windows-1252, so your page would be more accessible if you stuck
with ISO-8859-1.

Your page includes "&#146;", which is undefined (but not invalid)
regardless of the charset.  If you want to use windows-1252, you would use
the byte 0x92 for the "smart" apostrophe.  But I don't recommend doing
this as it will fail to show on most platforms other than Windows and Mac.

You're better off sticking with a normal apostrophe (').

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Friday, 20 April 2001 23:09:51 UTC