Re: When you want one odd character....

> Date:         Sat, 18 May 2002 06:50:21 +0200
> From: Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>
>
> On 17 May 02, at 14:07, Clint Jackson Baker wrote:
> > Also, how do I set the page encoding?
>
> Ideally, in the web server, by telling it that the page is UTF-8
> encoded (for example, for the Apache that my web hoster uses, I call
> the page "foo.html.utf8" and then have "AddCharset utf-8 .utf8" which
> causes Apache to send "Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8" to
> browsers). Otherwise, try adding
No. Ideally, character entities (the &# thingies) mean the same thing
and are displayed identically by all browsers out there, no matter
what character set the page is transmitted in. The HTML standard is
quite clear on this issue --- you can use Unicode character entities
even if your page is transmitted in Cyrillic or Mac Roman!

In the real world. however, your advice is good. In the old days,
browsers might need to map the Unicode characters on a page into many
different fonts since there were no full Unicode fonts, or even fonts
where you could use the Unicode code points directly. And some of them
don't do the work of setting that up unless they know from the start
that it's needed --- even though they might have a Unicode font.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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