Re: LYNX-DEV acccepted values for &#xxx;character entities

[Mike Brown]

> i've been talking to a webmaster recently who's trying to use « and
> » on his pages as 'european' or 'smart' quotes - in lynx they show up as
> 1/2 and an upper right-hand corner (ibm high-ascii characters 171 & 187).
> would anyone care to explain what values are valid in html/lynx, and if
> there's any way for him to get the quotes he wants...?

Sounds like you're on an MS-DOS based terminal. As Larry Virden posted, it
may be as simple as ensuring that the path from the host running lynx to
your pc is 8-bit clean and that the appropriate character set has been
selected from the (o)ptions screen in lynx. 

Assuming you're wanting to display documents encoded in ISO-8859-1 (Latin
1), which is the character set that is assumed by the HTML and HTTP
standards if something else isn't specified, the lynx character set to
select depends on your situation: 

  Windows (except "Terminal" font): Latin 1
       PC-based Unix (Linux, etc.): Latin 1
              MS-DOS (N. American): IBM PC Charset or 7-bit approximations
           Windows "Terminal" font: IBM PC Charset or 7-bit approximations
MS-DOS with codepage 850 activated: PC Codepage 850 or 7-bit approximations

Of course, if your terminal program has 8859-1 translation built in, by
all means, use it.  Info on IBM codepage 850 (essentially the MS-DOS
character set with the 8859-1 entities included) is available at: 
http://www.nyu.edu/pages/wsn/subir/lynx/2.6/IBMPC-charsets.announce

Which entities are valid depend on what character set is being used. 
Again assuming 8859-1, you should use the entities referenced quite nicely
at this URL (there is also a great HTML 3.2 reference at this site):

        http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/charset/

To quote from them, for the benefit of the community,

   ISO-8859-1 explicitly does not define displayable characters for
   positions 0-31 and 127-159, and the HTML standard does not allow those
   to be used for displayable characters. The only characters in this
   range that are used are 9, 10 and 13, which are tab, newline and
   carriage return respectively. If you attempt to display these invalid
   characters on your own system, you may find some characters displayed
   there, but please do not assume that other users will see the same
   thing (or even anything at all) on their systems.

   Although the specs require that all browsers support this character
   set, not all actually do.

The webmaster's decision to use the entities he is using is quite all
right in terms of validity.  But there is just no way to ensure that the
entities will be rendered properly by every browser on every system in
every character set.  Lynx, however, will indeed render the euro-quotes
properly, or will provide a reasonable approximation thereof, if you're
using the correct character set for your display. 

Mike
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