bsharvy@mac.com (Ben Sharvy) wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>>
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/ .[/color]
>
> I've read it. It didn't help.[/color]
Read it again.
[color=blue]
> I found the &#xxx; form. However, it doesn't display correctly on
> Opera 5 (Mac).[/color]
I'm usually against the idea that we should expect users to upgrade
their browsers, but surely we can regard Opera users as educated and
avantgardistic enough to update to something newer than that. At least
Opera 7 (Win) can display, say, Ā correctly an an uppercase A with
macron.
The problems are elsewhere, especially in Windows PC's that haven't got
"multilingual support" installed.
[color=blue]
> I've also discovered the CSS "overline" property,
> which I might employ instead.[/color]
There's something to be said in favor of that idea, if the macrons are
just additional information working as length mark (e.g., as in Latin
grammars). They might - just might - be seen as "presentational".
But on the practical side anyway, the overline property means what it
says, a line over the text line. Thus, for most characters, it is way
too high, since most characters (calculated by frequency in normal
text, where lower case dominates) have their tops well below the top of
the text line. In a word, the overline flies well over letters.
Besides, if you overline, say, "A", the overline extends over the full
character width, as opposite to a macron, which is far shorter.
[color=blue]
> Appleworks 6, MacOS 9.[/color]
I have no idea of the properties of that software, but the real
question is whether it can work using standardized character encodings,
or at least convert the result to them, instead of using Mac's
proprietary encodings.
[color=blue]
> I don't know what an "HTTP" header is, and that page doesn't say.
> But, I did look at the source of that page, and saw that it
> declares its charset in a <meta> tag.
>
> I looked at some other pages with the W3C's "Valid HTML 4.0" icon,
> and they usually use:
>
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
> CHARSET=iso-8859-1">
>
> Why do you say that's a mistake?[/color]
Well, you can put the "Valid HTML 4.0" icon on any page you like (the
W3C can't really prevent you), and validity is about formal grammar
_only_, so why would it affect the question how to specify the
character encoding properly? Besides, you are not really forbidden from
using the <meta> hack too; actually there are reasons in favor of using
it, too. The HTTP header is still the right way to specify the
encoding. Actually, the <meta> hack is just a plastic surrogate for it.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html 
