"Peter Krefting" <peter at opera dot com> wrote: >> Somewhat off-topic, I find it amusing that tolerance of "poorly >> encoded" input is considered justification for changing the >> underlying standards, when Internet Explorer has been flamed for >> years and years for tolerating bad input. > > It's called adapting to reality, unfortunately. There are *a lot* of > documents on the web labelled as being "iso-8859-1" and/or not > labelled at all, which are using characters from the 1252 codepage. > And since using the 1252 codepage to decode "proper" iso-8859-1 HTML > documents does not hurt anyone (as HTML up to version 4 explicitly > forbids the use of the control codes in the 0x80-0x9F range), that is > what everyone does.
My problem is with the double standard. In some people's minds, if IE does it, it's called "moronic" or "brain-dead." >>> One browser started to accept data in a form that it shouldn't have >>> accepted. Sloppy content producers started to rely on this. Because >>> the browser in question was the dominant browser, other browsers had >>> to try and re-engineer and follow that browser, or just be ignored. >> >> Evidently it's OK if W3C or Python does it, but not if Microsoft does >> it. > > Don't blame Microsoft here, it was Netscape (on Windows) that started > it, by just mapping the iso-8859-1 input data to a windows-1252 > encoded font output. The same pages that would work "fine" on Windows > would show garbage on Unix, until it was patched to also display it as > codepage 1252. Internet Explorer wasn't even published when this > happened, and I can't remember now whether the first versions of it > actually did this, or if it was bolted on later. This is the first time I've heard anyone say the problem didn't originate with IE. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
