I forget the exact reason, but for some reason it was not possible to
register "windows-1252" as an alias, although it does get used in
practice.
Chris
(not speaking for Microsoft)
-----Original Message-----
From: erik@netscape.com [SMTP:erik@netscape.com]
Sent: Monday, July 07, 1997 6:23 PM
To: Chris Pratley
Cc: Multiple Recipients of
Subject: Re: Usage of CP1252 characters on www.msnbc.com
Unicode Discussion wrote:
> They have many documents that use "smart quotes" :
> 0x93 0x201c #LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 0x94 0x201d #RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
>
> How to represent these in HTML?
>
> 1. Convert to dumb quotes
> They would be hopping mad if these turned into "dumb" straight
quotes.
>
> This may seem like a reasonable degradation to the average
technical
> person, but to customers this is known as "document
corruption".
>
> 2. Write out as Unicode &# NCRs. (the "correct" way)
> Unless they are using a Unicode enabled browser, these are
ignored as
> noted in this mail stream. On a corporate Intranet it is
conceivable
> that you could tell the customer they are required to upgrade
their
> browsers to the newest ones, but they really don't like that
kind of
> thing. On the Internet itself, it is obvious that only a
fraction of
> people upgrade to newer browsers as you noted. Fortunately
this is a
> growing fraction.
>
> 3. Write out as “ and ”.
> Oh look, on all of the customer's machines these display just
fine. It
>
> turns out that virtually all old browsers can understand these
> characters. There is a small % that does not (e.g. some Unix
> browsers).
> This is a problem for the external web site, but all the home
users
> they
> are trying to reach can read those characters fine.
A 4th possibility would be to use the actual single-byte values
from
CP1252. Strictly speaking, the document would then have to have
a
charset label that corresponds to CP1252. I also think Microsoft
should
register "windows-1252" as an alias for
"ISO-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1".
Erik van der Poel @ Netscape, but not speaking for Netscape
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