Wolf Eichler wrote: > Ok, that makes things a slight little bit clearer. :) > > <... programs like NN4 which maps the Euro to 0x80 under ISO-8859-1 ...> > > But why is it so that "programs like NN4" map the symbol to 0x80 and > why does it function? Does it only function in NN4? Could it not be > 0x80 is a quasi standard by now? Would be interesting how IE behaves > in that regard.
First, no amount of wishing that 0x80 becomes a standard code point for the Euro for ISO-8859-1 is going to make it a standard or quasi-standard for ISO-8859-1. Someone has to officially define that code point for ISO-8859-1 and that has not happened. Instead we have ISO-8859-15, UTF-8, and Windows-1252 as an alternative for generating the Euro in Mozilla if your intended encoding is Western (ISO-8859-1). Second, in order to understand why we had to support Euro in NN4 in the way it does, you have to look at the history of Euro support in Microsoft Windows and NN4. Microsoft was aggressively promoting 0x80 as the new Euro character around 1997 and was publishing modified Windows fonts which contained this glyph. For Microsoft, this was fairly straightforward. They defined the Euro for Windows-1252 as 0x80 (they treat ISO-8859-1 as its subset and so by implication it would be 0x80 for 8859-1 as well) and then started putting out modified fonts for users to download. (They defined it using other code points for other Windows-125x code pages.) Netscape started supporting the Euro display with versions 4.06 and 4.5, which went out about the same time -- circa 1998. NN4's problem was that it could not and would not support Windows-only encoding like Windows-1252 and was committed to using ISO-8859-1 instead, which could be supported on any platforms. Remember, Windows-1252 was not even registered in the official IANA charset registry at that point. Internally NN4 processes Windows-1252 as a variant of ISO-8859-1 but externally there was/is no UI menu for it. ISO-8859-15 was only starting at that point and had no widespread support. (Maybe it still doesn't ... even today.) So we had to make a decision on the Euro. But Microsoft's decision to en-code the Euro as 0x80 for Windows-1252 forced our hand. We had to support it at 0x80 for ISO-8859-1 because that is the only way to ensure compatibility with pages and messages in Windows-1252, which NN4 ** code-internally ** processes as an equivalent of ISO-8859-1. This is why the Euro was mapped to 0x80 in NN4. (By the way NN4 supports ISO-8859-15 only on Unix.) Mozilla has made a conscious decision ** not to generate ** a undefined code point for any encoding. That is why we are debating this issue now in: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109342 - Kat [The rest omitted...] -- Katsuhiko Momoi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Senior International Manager, Web Standards/Embedding Netscape Technology Evangelism/Developer Support
