RE: iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Bailey, Bruce wrote:

> I believe
> that "windows-1252" was not technically IANA approved at the time.  Is it
> approved now?

Yes, see <ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/character-sets>.

> I understand that including the charset reference doesn't really make the
> typographical apostrophe and quotation marks &#146 &#147; &#148; that I
> insist on using much more cross platform compatible, but in theory it could
> help.

I don't believe that it helps in theory or in practice.  I think you would
get the same results in theory and practice if you used
charset=ISO-8859-1.  In theory, &#146; is always undefined.  In practice,
most browsers treat ISO-8859-1 as an alias for windows-1252.

> I am not about to start coding with 8-bit ASCII.

ASCII is 7-bit only.

> Once the school where I teach (and much of the rest of the
> world) gives up on Navigator 4x, I will switch to &ldquo; and &rdquo;  For
> now, I believe quite fervently (and with defensible reason) that the &#147;
> ... &#148; construct does the least harm!

FWIW, my Netscape 4.76 on Linux renders &#8220; ... &#8221; equivalently
to " ... " and &#147; ... &#148;.  I'm not sure whether earlier versions
of Netscape 4.x are the same in this respect.

> P.S.  I am loath to admit it, but if you or Gerald change your validators to
> reject those characters, this would also prompt me to stop using them.

The validators put standards above user opinions.

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Monday, 23 April 2001 13:21:56 UTC