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

On 23.04.01 at 09:20, Bailey, Bruce <Bruce.Bailey@ed.gov> wrote:

>Please accept that for a certain minority of us, neutral apostrophes and
>quotation marks (in proportional spaced fonts) are glaringly obvious,
>intolerably ugly, and hallmarks of amateurishness.  Some of this group, of
>which I am not ashamed to be a member, refuse to write without them.

This group is making the mistake that visual appearance has anything at all
to do with document structure or validity. It doesn't. Even if no browsers
support the Q element, it is still the proper way to mark quotations. That
you need to make concessions to browser bugs is a different matter.


>It was a result of off-list admonishment I got resulting from my post at
>URL: <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JulSep/0167.html>
>that I started manually including the Windows charset statement.  I
>believe that "windows-1252" was not technically IANA approved at the time.
> Is it approved now?

AFAIK, yes, it is. However, you should, if at all possible, be using
UNICODE (I understand that this may not be an available option for you).


>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'm not sure what the state of browser support for these are, but in
theory, numerical character references always refer to UNICODE code points
and so it doesn't matter what you put in for charset, it'll still be the
UNICODE characters.


>Once the school where I teach (and
>much of the rest of the world) gives up on Navigator 4x

Let's all pray this happens soon! Netscape 4.x is a headache for us all.
:-(


>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! Sincerely, Bruce
>
>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.

Not to give anyone the idea that "I'll hold my breath until I get my way"
is a workable strategy for feture requests -- :-) -- but I'm thinking I'll
make that Windows 3.1 charset an alias for windows-1252 in the Validator. I
see no real harm in it and it'll be convenient for users stuck with it for
whatever reason.

In the mean time, you might want to try using windows-1252 and see if that
won't solve your problem; if UNICODE doesn't work for you.

Received on Friday, 27 April 2001 04:05:59 UTC