Re: 8859-1, 8859-15, 1252 and Euro

From: Frank da Cruz (fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 11:00:20 EST


> At 02:56 PM 02/07/2000 -0800, A. Vine wrote:
> >Tim Greenwood wrote:
> > >
> > > Pretty much all of the pages on the web, and the browsers, ignore the
> > > differences between ISO-8859-1 and Windows code page 1252.
> >
> >I wish they would! I'm pretty sick of seeing question marks where there
> >should be quotes, apostrophes, bullets, em-dashes, etc.
>
> The real [short term] solution is to have a preference switch that says
> "Treat ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252" so that the "undefined" (x80-x9F) range
> maps to the Windows-1252 characters. Also users should send some
> "clue-by-four" error messages to web sites that do not show the character
> set as windows-1252 instead of ISO-8859-1 when using this character range
> (ie: Show the CORRECT Character Set). IMO - A BUG REPORT to ADOBE and MS
> for their Web Design products to say that use of these characters should
> FORCE windows-1252 into the HTML is not out of line.
>
The use of Windows code pages in data communications protocols is bad, bad,
bad. Here we are saying "well, CP-1252 is just like Latin-1 except it
includes the extra characters we need for our documents so we'll use it
instead of Latin-1 but call it Latin-1 because really it's a fixed version
of Latin-1". But then we start thinking we can do the same thing with (for
example) Latin-2 and CP1250. Which would be a bad mistake, because the two
are not alike at all. Ditto for Latin/Cyrillic and CP1251. In general,
Windows code pages are NOT just "extended" ISO 8859-x's.

- Frank



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