> So you are really saying that typing > "I have got £100 to spare" > is OK, instead of: > “I have got £100 to spare” > (just as an example, of course). > Really?
Yes, really. HTML as SGML application has so called document character set, which is UCS (Universal Character Set,ISO10646). You can think of it as a huge (tens of thousands) list of characters where each character is identified by an integer number, so called code point. This list is identical to that of Unicode so if you pick any character in Unicode and then look up the character with the same code poin in UCS they will be identical. Document character set should not be confused with your html file encoding, which for historical reasons is specified using "charset" attribute. Basically encoding tells how to convert bytes in your document into characters. Let's say your have a byte with numerical value 200 (C8 in hex) in your document. If your document has encoding ISO885-5 that maps into cyrillic letter "Ш". If your document's encoding is ISO5589-13 that will be the letter "Č". Browsers are supposed to map known encodings to document character set, where "Ш" is code point 1064 (0x0428) and "Č" is code point 268 (0x010C). Let's suppose that for some reason you want to have "Ш" in your ISO8859-13 encoded document. You cannot type it in directly, because this character is not in your specified character set. Character entities to rescue—they let you specify character from *HTML document character set, UCS*. This is important and some mistakenly think that character entities map to the current encoding (I think some old browsers did indeed do that, but that's a bug). So È won't give you "Č" in ISO8859-13 and won't give you "Ш" in ISO8859-5: in both cases you will get character which has code point 200 in unicode/ucs—"È". So that's where character entities are useful—you can display UCS characters which are not available in your charset. If you are using unicode encoding there is not need for that, just type the character. For more info see: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-what-is-encoding http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html Regards, Rimantas -- http://rimantas.com/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
