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

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

>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? 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.

Ok, I wanted this figured out once and for all, so I went straight to the
source and grabbed the Microsoftie of record, Chris Wendt. According to
him, iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1 is a strict subset of windows-1252.
IOW, you can simply change your charset to windows-1252 and be both
standards compliant and use your fancy apostrophe.

The difference between the two lie in the code points between 0x80 (U+20AC)
and 0x9F (U+0178), which were not defined in iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1
but which _are_ defined in windows-1252 (0x80 is the Euro symbol). Your
chars seem to fall in this range.

He also reveals that iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1 is not actually defined
anywhere. It's defined simply by the implementation (Windows 3.1) -- though
he did offer to go dig it up out of the vault for me :-) -- so it should be
considered deprecated and iso-8869-*, windows-*, or UNICODE should be used
instead as appropriate. The specific reccomendation was "If [you are] not
using code points 0x80 to 0x9F, but any of the code points 0xA0 to 0xFF,
the recommendation is to label [as iso-8859-1]." and if you need 0x80-0x9F
you should use windows-1252.

The published specification for Windows Code Page 1252 resides on
<URL:http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.htm>.


As a result of this I'm going to leave iso-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1
unsupported -- but might issue a warning it's deprecated and that you
should use windows-1252/iso-8859-1 instead -- unless someone convinces me
otherwise (wanna have a say here Ger?).

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 19:45:22 UTC