From kfm-devel Sat Mar 27 18:19:25 1999 From: Dawit Alemayehu Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 18:19:25 +0000 To: kfm-devel Subject: Re: Sites with Illegal character entities & khtmlw X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=92386547425826 On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, Andreas Pour wrote: >Dawit Alemayehu wrote: > >> Greetings, >> >> There is one annoying problem with the way kfm handles incorrect character >> entities. Currently on my pc it displays small black rectangular boxes that >> distract me from reading the page. To see an example of this go to >> http://www.msnbc.com/news/253207.asp. If you view the source for the document, >> they use ’ “ ” all over the place. However, none of these >> character entities are valid for neither HTML 3.2 nor HTML 4.0 specs. I truly >> fail to see why they use these characters at all. Does anyone know ? Perhaps >> these characters are allowed in M$ Active Server pages, but they sure are not >> valid standard character entities. >> >> My question then is, would it be wise to add a check in htmltoken.cpp that will >> check for the range of non-printable and convert them to spaces or simply >> ignore them ? I particulary see the ’ on many many sites being used to >> incorrectly repesent the apostrophe ( ' ) character. > >Whether or not it is "incorrect" depends quite heavily on the assumption that some >committee standard is more important than reality. I agree with you on the whole of this statement, but remember the committee standard you refered was created with the help of these same folks you are talking about. >Reality is that both Netscape and IE support the Netscape ISO extensions for >quotes and dashes, and, if 95% or more of people can see them, why is that not >a standard? I did not know that Netscape had added extension to the ISO Latin-1 charater entities. >Esp. when it is so easy to comply with this, why would you convert >them to spaces instead of what the web page author intended them to be? Again, I made that statment out of ignorance of not knowing about the Netscape's extensions. Your are correct in that it is probably easy to comply with this extension. Well off I go to Netscape's site .... I will see what I can do about fixing it. Thanks, Dawit A.