RE: Unicode usage

> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Thomas B.
> Passin
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 12:12 AM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  Unicode usage
>
> ...
>
> Maybe there's a misunderstanding, but I think we're pretty close.
>  We agree
> that if the display font doesn't have a glyph for a character,
> you will get
> and empty box.  You are saying, I think, that if the encoding is
> declared to
> be UTF-8, for instance, the browser or the editor or whatever should
> translate that to the corresponding character in the display character set
> and thence display it correctly.

No, I'm saying that the encoding is completely irrelevant, as long the
encoding declaration and the *actual* encoding match. Wrong declarations are
the problem, because if the declaration doesn't match the encoding, the user
agent will do the wrong thing for non-ASCII characters (ignoring EBCDIC for
a moment :-).

> That would seem logical, but I don't think it always happens.  I think it
> depends on the version of Windows you have and which application you use.
> Just think of all those posts to this list where an accented character
> displayed as something else.  We usually tell them that the character is

AFAIK, all these we caused by inproper encoding declarations.

> correct in the file but not displayed right because of the
> encoding - there
> must be dozens of posts like that.
>
> If I remember what people have said, on Win95/98,  for instance, Notepad
> doesn't know about utf-8, whereas on Win2000, Notepad is supposed to know
> about it.

Yes, but Notepad is not an XML (or HTML) editor, so how does this matter?

> > > Maybe someone else knows a solution for this problem of displaying
> > > high-order characters...
> >
> > I don't think this is a general problem at all. Just refer to the
> > appropriate Unicode character code, and then it's up to the browser to
> find
> > a way to display th character.
> >
>
> Ideally, but if your browser/OS combination doesn't do that, what then?

Then you lost. There is no other portable way. Get a fixed browser.
IE/Netscape 6/Mozilla/Opera should be fine.


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