Netscape Composer: How to set charset for a page?

[Ronald Fischer]

When I create a new page using Netscape Composer, it always includes
a meta tag

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

in the header. I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead. How can I
do this? An alternative would be to tell Netscape to leave out the charset
attribute altogether, because this would then mean "us-ascii" by default,
but I don't know how to do it either.

Of course I can edit the HTML file using a text editor, but I wonder wheather
there is a way to do it within Netscape Composer.

I know the View/Character coding menu, but there is no "us-ascii" to choose
from, only iso-8859-1.

I also know the View/Character Coding/Customize submenu, but here too there
is no us-ascii.

Ronald

[Rijk van Geijtenbeek]

On 4 Nov 2004 05:11:49 -0800, Ronald Fischer <ro*****@eml.cc > wrote:

When I create a new page using Netscape Composer, it always includes
a meta tag
This is a very tool-specific question. Are you talking about the ancient
Netscape 4 Composer BTW? It might be useful to try to find a group
dedicated to the tool you use.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">

in the header. I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead.

As US-ASCII is a subset of ISO-8859-1, changing this should make no
difference whatsoever to the display of webpages.

--
Rijk van Geijtenbeek

The Web is a procrastination apparatus:
It can absorb as much time as is required to ensure that you
won't get any real work done. - J.Nielsen

[Lauri Raittila]

in comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Ronald Fischer wrote:

When I create a new page using Netscape Composer, it always includes
a meta tag

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

in the header. I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead. How can I
do this?
Why would you want to do that?
An alternative would be to tell Netscape to leave out the charset
attribute altogether, because this would then mean "us-ascii" by default,
but I don't know how to do it either.
IIRC, default is ISO-8859-1, not us-ascii, in HTTP.
I know the View/Character coding menu, but there is no "us-ascii" to choose
from, only iso-8859-1.

US-ASCII is subset of iso-8859-1. So nothing will be missing, even if one
uses iso-8859-1

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>

[Pierre Goiffon]

"Ronald Fischer" <ro*****@eml.cc > a écrit dans le message de
news:21******** *************** **@posting.goog le.com

When I create a new page using Netscape Composer

(...)

If you refer to the old Netscape Communicator composer, or the one that is
packaged with Netscape 6 or 7, then i hardly recommend that you switch to
NVU :
http://www.nvu.com/
It's the up to date Mozilla Composer, including cascades for CSS and many
more features.
Free, but not already in the 1.0 state (but always better than the old
composer)

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Lauri Raittila wrote:

in comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Ronald Fischer wrote:

in the header. I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead.
How can I do this?

Why would you want to do that?

It's an oddball request, indeed, even if it's technically correct.

An alternative would be to tell Netscape to leave out the charset
attribute altogether, because this would then mean "us-ascii" by default,

IIRC, default is ISO-8859-1, not us-ascii, in HTTP.

It's not that simple!

There's a generic RFC that claims that the default for all text/*
MIME types is us-ascii - I forget the number, it shouldn't be hard to
find...

There's an HTTP specification (RFC2616) that claims that the default
for an HTTP transaction is iso-8859-1

And there's an HTML/4.01 specification that claims that there is -no-
default for HTML.

As you can see, these claims are not entirely compatible with each
other :-{

from, only iso-8859-1.

US-ASCII is subset of iso-8859-1. So nothing will be missing, even
if one uses iso-8859-1

Yes, but there may then be coded characters present that aren't legal
in ASCII; presumably (but it would have been better if the questioner
had been explicit about such details) that is what the questioner was
trying to avoid.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

ro*****@eml.cc (Ronald Fischer) wrote:

When I create a new page using Netscape Composer, it always includes
a meta tag

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">

in the header.
Only by default. You can edit in the HTML mode (click on <HTML Source> to
switch to that mode). In a sufficiently new Composer, you can also change
the encoding by saving the document via "Save As Charset" in the "File"
menu.

Moreover, you might be able - depending on what you can do on the server
- to make the server send an actual Content-Type header, overriding the
<meta> hack. This is unwise though, since someone might save the document
locally, using a browser that won't fix the situation. (I'm afraid
browsers are kinda stupid in such issues.)
I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead.
As others have pointed out, this is most probably a misunderstandin g.
I know the View/Character coding menu,

It's about viewing documents, not about authoring.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Pierre Goiffon]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> a écrit dans le message de
news:Pi******** *************** *******@ppepc56 .ph.gla.ac.uk

There's a generic RFC that claims that the default for all text/*
MIME types is us-ascii - I forget the number, it shouldn't be hard to
find...

There's an HTTP specification (RFC2616) that claims that the default
for an HTTP transaction is iso-8859-1

And there's an HTML/4.01 specification that claims that there is -no-
default for HTML.

Everything is summurize in that document :
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#text-html

[Ronald Fischer]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote in message news:<Pi******* *************** ********@ppepc5 6.ph.gla.ac.uk> ...

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Lauri Raittila wrote:

in comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Ronald Fischer wrote:

in the header. I would like to have it charset=us-ascii instead.
How can I do this?

Why would you want to do that?

It's an oddball request, indeed, even if it's technically correct.

US-ASCII is subset of iso-8859-1. So nothing will be missing, even
if one uses iso-8859-1

Yes, but there may then be coded characters present that aren't legal
in ASCII; presumably (but it would have been better if the questioner
had been explicit about such details) that is what the questioner was
trying to avoid.

Correct: I'm using a German keyboard and would like to avoid that,
by mistake, a German umlaut slips into the generated HTML page (instead
of the HTML equivalent, say, &auml;). Of course it would be very
convenient that the composer automatically converts an umlaut I'm
typing into the correct HTML equivalent, but this was not my
primary concern.

BTW, I'm using the composer which comes with Netscape 7.

And big thanks for all the helpful comments.

Ronald

[Markus Ernst]

Ronald Fischer wrote:

Correct: I'm using a German keyboard and would like to avoid that,
by mistake, a German umlaut slips into the generated HTML page
(instead
of the HTML equivalent, say, &auml;). Of course it would be very
convenient that the composer automatically converts an umlaut I'm
typing into the correct HTML equivalent, but this was not my
primary concern.

I think you are on the wrong steamer (do they say this in English, too?)...
;-)

The character set indicated in the head of a web page tells the browser how
to interpret non-ascii characters. So as the german umlauts are part of
iso-8859-1, but probably not of us-ascii, changing this setting might result
in the contrary of what you want: If by mistake an "ä" remains in the code,
it will be shown correctly with the iso-8859-1 setting, but incorrectly with
the us-ascii setting. I might get corrected if I am wrong here.

If your editor uses the character set meta tag to decide which characters it
encodes as HTML entities, I consider this as a bug of the editor. In this
case I suggest to use another product such as Dreamweaver which encodes all
non-ascii characters by default.

--
Markus

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <21************ *************@p osting.google.c om>, dated
Wed, 10 Nov 2004 06:55:48, seen in news:comp.infos ystems.www.authoring.h
tml, Ronald Fischer <ro*****@eml.cc > posted :

Correct: I'm using a German keyboard and would like to avoid that,
by mistake, a German umlaut slips into the generated HTML page (instead
of the HTML equivalent, say, &auml;). Of course it would be very
convenient that the composer automatically converts an umlaut I'm
typing into the correct HTML equivalent, but this was not my
primary concern.

If you use a PC, then you can use my simple program EIGHTBIT - get it
via sig line 3 below - to scan a file for characters with the upper bit
set. And you can use my HUNT to make it check many files, date-
selectively :

HUNT *.htm f#-28 "EIGHTBIT" u e

to check all files dated less than 29 days ago.

Reporting is simple, on the basis that those that are found will be
changed.

Of course, a programmable editor like MiniTrue could be scripted to
convert all dubious characters, such as those with umlauts or cedillas,
to sequences such as &uuml;, with if desirable each change being
queried.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon. co.uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
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