On Tue, Aug 5, Jukka K. Korpela inscribed on the eternal scroll:
Yes, that's correct. The FAQ is getting a bit dusty (allusions intended),
but it has a fairly nice explanation of this:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/bas...l#special-char
True enough. The content, as far as it goes, is still accurate I
think, but the emphasis is hardly appropriate for current usage, is
it?
And the reference to browsers which run on MS-DOS is surely a distinct
rarity nowadays! That Czech MS-DOS browser - Arachne - has I think
long-since sorted out its confusion with DOS character coding; and
running Lynx under DOS must be very much a minority sport, no?
So some of the historical bits could be cleared out, and modern bits
added.
However, the key to this whole area - and I think we've seen that
demonstrated again by this thread (no disrepect intended to the
questioner) - is that there is widespread misunderstanding and lack of
knowledge of the HTML4 (RFC2070) character representation model, and
that seems to be the hardest piece of the puzzle to remedy. With some
folks it's doubly hard, because they are *convinced* that they already
know all the theoretical stuff, when in fact what they "know" is
fundamentally wrong. That's the very hardest kind of case to handle,
in all walks of life ;-}
(If *only* the MIME folks hadn't given us the attribute "charset" to
refer - not to a "character set" as it's understood nowadays - but to
the character *encoding*.)
best regards
--
The CPU had all its registers represented on the front panel by the neon
lights; there were 8 48-bit cache registers neatly aligned - a perfect
way for the kernel to communicate with operators "if everything else fails".
Today we have to count beep signals from the BIOS. - BESM-6 nostalgia page
