[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: Sites with Illegal character entities & khtmlw
From:       Dawit Alemayehu <adawit () earthlink ! net>
Date:       1999-03-27 18:19:25
[Download RAW message or body]

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 &#146; &#147; &#148; 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 &#146; 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.

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]