Re: OT: Question: Unicode

On Sun, May 18, 2003 at 06:48:29PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > If you include any characters whose numbers are above 255, you
> > technically need to declare the file to be Unicode of some variety.
>
> AFAIK this is only true of Netscape 4.x, and is a bug.
> The document character set of HTML is Unicode; that is, no matter
> what the specific encoding, any Unicode character may be used in
> any HTML document.
Actually, prior to HTML 4, the only W3C-specified document character
set for HTML was Latin-1, although you could tell browsers to pretend
a given document was something else.  HTML 4 made ISO-10646-1 the
official abstract character set for HTML and officially sanctioned
hexadecimal entity notation as well as the use of entities with
values greater than 255 decimal.

I don't think Netscape 4.x ever claimed to implement HTML 4, and as such
I wouldn't call its behavior a bug.

I am amazed that people continue to use 4.x, though.  Netscape 7,
or straight-up Mozilla is a much better browser.  I guess the
horror that was Netscape 6.0 scared folks off.

-Mark