Editing in html

[David J Birnbaum]

Dear SEELANGers,

HTML 3.2, the current W3G standard, supports only the ISO Latin 1 (Western
European) character set. For more information, see:

        http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32.html

While it is possible to trick some browsers into supporting some different
character sets, these tricks are non-standard and are not guaranteed to
work on all browsers. If you want your information to be accessible to all
readers, you need to keep within the standard. If you absolutely need to
display Cyrillic (or anything other than ISO Latin 1), you need to violate
the standard.

The available tricks usually permit the user to replace the standard ISO
Latin 1 code page with a different 8-bit code page at the level of an
entire HTML document. Most (perhaps all) current browsers do not permit
8-bit code pages to be combined within a single document. This means that
even the hacks mentioned in the preceding paragraph will not provide a
combination of, for example, German and Russian, although they will allow
a user to sacrifice German support (part of ISO Latin 1) for Russian.

The W3G draft HTML 4.0 spec identifies UCS (Unicode) as the document
character set. UCS attempts to support all standard writing systems in a
16-bit inventory, and web browsers that support UCS will be able to
display documents in arbitrary combinations of writing systems. For more
information, see:

        http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-html40/

Slavists who attended last week's annual meeting of the AAASS in Seattle
may have heard me speak about XML, which is also based on UCS. For more
information, see:

        http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml.html

With best wishes,

David
________________________________________________________________________

Professor David J. Birnbaum     email: djbpitt+ at pitt.edu
Department of Slavic Languages  url:   http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/
1417 Cathedral of Learning      voice: 1-412-624-5712
University of Pittsburgh        fax:   1-412-624-9714
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA