Jukka K. Korpela, Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:31:46 +0300: > 2012-07-17 17:11, Leif Halvard Silli wrote: > >>>> For instance, early on in 'the Web', some appeared to think >>>> that all non-ASCII had to be represented as entities. >>> >>> Yes indeed. There's still some such stuff around. It's mostly >>> unnecessary, but it doesn't hurt. >> >> Actually, above I described an example where it did hurt ... > > The situation is comparable to the BOM issue. In the old days, it was > considered (with good reasons presumably) safer to omit the BOM than > to use it in UTF-8, and it was considered safer to use entity > references rather than direct non-ASCII data. It has changed now, but > people are conservative, and people read old warnings.
Good point. > We should now say that BOM is not required in UTF-8, but it is safer > to use it, unless you have good reasons not to use it (e.g., > authoring environment that dislikes it). Similarly, character data > should preferably be in UTF-8, unless you have good reasons (mostly > on the authoring side, not clients) to avoid it an use entity and > character references instead. Indeed. >> I have discovered one browser where it does hurt more directly: In W3M, >> the text browser, which is also included in Emacs. W3M doesn't handle >> (all) entities. E.g. it renders å and å as an 'aa' instead >> of as an 'å', for instance. > > To take a more modern example, the native e-mail client on my Android > seems to systematically display character and entity references > literally when displaying message headers with small excerpts of > content, even though it correctly interprets them when displaying the > message itself. To quote one W3m slogan: 'Its 8-bit support is second to none'. W3m is a quite modern text browser. It is regularly updated, it can be used with emacs, and is the text browser I would recommend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m Elinks does a decent job as well, when it comes to giving the another editor - VIM - the capability to open web pages directly from an URL ... So I don't subscribe to the 'modern' thing, quite ... -- Leif Halvard Silli
