Re: HTML, ASCII, and Homesite

["Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- JAEDWORKS -dot- COM>]

At 2:20 PM -0800 1/4/99, Eric J. Ray wrote:
>>4.  Different computer platforms and operating systems map high-ASCII
>>characters differently.  Just because an em dash is 151 on a Windows machine
>>doesn't mean it's 151 everywhere else.  Using an entity name rather than a
>>number lets a browser interpret a character for its particular platform.
>But the numbers are NOT Windows/ANSI values--they're the normative
>values in the spec.

Erm. 151, however, is undefined in HTML - on a Windows browser that uses
Windows character mapping instead of ISO-Latin or Unicode, you may well get
an m-dash, but it's by no means guaranteed. The correct numeric entity for
an m-dash is — - however, as I think someone else pointed out,
support for Unicode entities (the ones with large numeric representations)
is pretty recent and still very spotty.

The bottom line is that it's not a good idea yet to use m- and n-dashes in
HTML if you're concerned about compatibility - there's just no good,
well-supported method available as yet. Ugly as it may be, the single or
double dash will serve you better.

The even bottommer line is that you can't trust your browser to show you if
you've got a compatibility problem. Most browsers are quite forgiving and
will go to some lengths to display nonstandard HTML in some reasonable way,
but you can't rely on that reasonable way to be consistent across
platforms, browsers, or even different versions of the same browser.

--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed -at- jaedworks -dot- com
http://www.jaedworks.com


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