Re: German_Umlauts

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lloyd Wood" <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
To: "Martin Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>
Cc: "Rainer Ziener" <ziener@tls-tautenburg.de>; <www-validator@w3.org>;
<mrengel@tls-tautenburg.de>
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 6:08 PM
Subject: Re: German_Umlauts


> On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:
>
> &amp; is the better choice, since it conveys meaning between different
> character sets using different values for characters. (Having to write
> &#163; for the UK pound sterling symbol in the absence of a meaningful
> representation leads to confusion in character sets where char 163 is
> something else.)

Not really. &#163; is *always* the pound sign, no matter what character
encoding (= charset) is used. See <URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html >. &#number; always refer to
character number in the ISO 10646 character set (~Unicode 3.0). (But a byte
with the value 163 (decimal) will refer to different characters in different
chracter encodings. E.g. in KOI8-R, it will be the io letter, which looks
similar to an ë, but &#163; will stil be a pound.)

> I don't think there's a symbol corresponding to the umlaut mark by
> itself in most character sets

Many character sets *do* have this character, even ISO-8559-1. Example: ¨.

> (don't ask me about unicode).

Unicode even has a combining ¨, U+0308. So you can write ü as U+00FC or U+0075
U+0308.

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer

Received on Sunday, 1 July 2001 13:20:18 UTC