I had a look at the reference page you have directed me to: it actually states that the ISO-8859-1 character set can be used for English. Although my hypothesis that the word œovre is not English remains valid (see also the citations in the appendix), I admit that the fact that the ligature œ is not included in the character set (and, consequently, that the character set ISO-8859-1 cannot be used for encoding French text, which I find kind of stunning because of the popularity of the French language) provides a much simpler explanation to the observable phenomenon. My fault, I should have checked that up first. Best regards Chris
APPENDIX Other Wikipedia entries also disagree, e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%92> Borrowings into English from Latin words featuring œ are often spelled with the letter e, especially in American English. For example, fœderal became federal in English, while fœtus became fetus only in American English. Other œs in English spell out as 2 separate letters oe. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spelled_with_a_ligat ure> The use of the œ and æ is obsolescent in modern English, and has been used predominantly in British English. It is usually used to evoke archaism, or in literal quotations of historic sources. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differen ces#Simplification_of_ae_.28.C3.A6.29_and_oe_.28.C5.93.29> In English, which has imported words from all three languages, it is now usual to replace Æ/æ with Ae/ae and Œ/œ with Oe/oe. Microsoft Word does not accept hors d'œuvre but it has no problem with hors d'oeuvre. The American English International keyboard does not provide a way to type the ligature œ. The Microsoft Encarta dictionary does not recognize such a spelling, nor does Reference.com. The word coeur is not mentioned in any English dictionary I know. -----Original Message----- From: Oistein E. Andersen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 11:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [whatwg] Entity parsing [trema/diaeresis vs umlaut] You might want to have a look at http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1 . Afterwards, consider the following: 1) Latin-1 does not contain all the characters that are required for typesetting of English.
