Re: charset question

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@compuserve.com)
Date: Sat Apr 08 2000 - 01:06:53 EDT


Curtis Clark <jcclark@csupomona.edu> wrote:

> Is there a metatag charset designation for MacRoman that works reliably
> in IE and NS? I want to be able to use Macintosh text directly in a web
> page and have it display correctly cross-platform (the alternatives are
> to train the person who graciously consents to supply the text or else
> convert it on a piece-by-piece basis myself).

The way to have a Web page display correctly cross-platform is to encode
it in Unicode, or at least in Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1), using either numeric
character references or entities for the characters outside the ASCII
range.

The page can be encoded in UTF-8 (my favorite), but doing so may limit
the ability of some earlier browsers to display the page.

Web pages should not be encoded in MacRoman at all. We just had a big
debate on this list where many people agreed that even Windows-1252, a
superset of ISO 8859-1 (from the standpoint of most Web browsers, Frank),
should not be used across the Internet. If this is true for Windows-
1252, it is double-plus true for MacRoman and other encodings that are
even farther removed from Latin-1 and Unicode.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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