Re: Codepage

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, Frank Ellermann wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> > I don't think the validator should be enhanced to support
> > such encodings.
>
> Where's the problem ?

First, there are many real problems that need to be fixed in the
validator.

Second, authors should not be encouraged to use such rarely used and never
needed proprietary encodings.

> Today it's either windows-1252 or Unicode for scripts roughly
> covered by Latin-1.

I wonder why you don't mention the most obvious alternative.

> But if you need box drawing characters
> you have a real problem.

I didn't see any reference to them in the question, and I think very few
people actually use them, and hardly anyone _needs_ them.

> Of course you
> find them all in Unicode, somewhere, but that's not the same
> as "all browsers support it" or "Web-friendly".

Depending on what you imagine as the potential use of box drawing
characters, they would better be replaced by the use of CSS (especially
border properties), or images with suitable alt texts, or reformulation of
the content.

> <http://purl.net/xyzzy/xhtml.htm>  (output of xhtml.kex)

On IE and Firefox, I see the source code of XHTML.KEX, inside a <pre>
element. Is this what you meant to present? Why?

> <http://purl.net/xyzzy/ibm850.htm> (incl. PC graphics)

On IE and Firefox, I see the string

%ent-isopub;  %ent-isonum;  %ent-isolat2;  %ent-isobox;  %ent-isotech;
%ent-isoamsa;  %ent-isoamso; ]>

at the very beginning. Moreover, undefined entities like &blank; are shown
literally. Your comparison is odd, since you present

I would suggest upgrading from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01. Actually the page
is not even XHTML 1.0, though a validator won't notice this. The XHTML 1.0
specification requires the use of one of specific DOCTYPE declarations,
literally. And using XML with XHTML tags doesn't really work on the Web
du jour.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Sunday, 3 October 2004 16:55:18 UTC