Re: iso 8859 or escape sequencies?

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Mon, 11 Apr 1994 15:50:20 -0500

In message <9404112037.AA16011@ptsun03.cern.ch>, Ari Luotonen writes:
>
>> |Is there a reason to use the html "escape-sequencies" (&oumlaut for |
>> |etc.) for characters that are also in the iso 8859-1 character-set? Are
>> |there browswers that do not support the full iso8859 character set but
>> |do support the escape-sequencies?
>> | -Timo H

The &ouml; form is strictly for authoring in environments where
&ouml is easier to enter than the 8-bit char (God help you if
you're in such a situation, but...)

If it were just a matter of getting through 7-bit data paths, all
these are representable in &#nnn; form as well.

A WWW implementation should act like an SGML parser and reduce
"&ouml;", "&#nnn;" and the single 8-bit char representation to the
same thing before further processing.

So a browser that handles "&ouml;" but doesn't handle raw 8-bit
chars is broken. For example, HTML2MIF tools generally contain
a big table to translate ISOLatin1 to the PostScript encoding used
by Frame. The same should be true of Mac-based browsers, EBCDIC
browsers, etc.

Dan