lynx-dev Re: LYNX-DEV cp1252 (shudder)

[David Woolley]

I spotted this, with an O status, when purging my folders...
> 
> On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, David Woolley wrote:
> 
> > > A question was raised as to whether these horrible MS-created quasi HTML
> > > documents that use cp1252 (whether overtly or not), that one finds so
> > 
> > The overt ones are technically legal, but may require an HTML 4.0 doctype,
> 
> As 8-bit characters, their meaning is defined by HTTP protocols; the

The technical quibble here was that Unicode as the underlying character
set was a recent development, and that one might need HTML 4 to use
non-ISO 8559/1 characters.

> 
> > Numeric entities are then interpreted as
> > code points in the canonical character set.  145 and 146, etc. are not
> > defined code points in Unicode.  
> 
> Of course.  Nevertheless, MS software creates these illegal and
> meaningless representations, and it would be obtuse to claim that we don't

This is a difficult policy issue.  Every time one changes to compensate
for such bugs, one is effectively changing the specification.  That tends
to legitimise any bugs introduced by Microsoft.  (I actually tend towards
the cock-up, rather then conspiracy, theory on this one, although I think
a lot of what MS does is for coldly calculated commercial reasons.)
It certainly reduces the chances of people finding the bugs in their
pages.  My feeling on this one is that ’ is a cosmetic imperfection,
which should give the viewer clues as to the competence of the site,
without making things significantly difficult to read.