[thelist] dealing with spanish / international characters

Tue Feb 13 10:17:31 CST 2001

Hi Peter

Re your last query about character sets: I have found that if you want to
use special non-ASCII characters in your documents, it is enough just to
specify the character set at the start of the document. We use

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; CHARSET=iso-8859-1">

This handles all the western european languages fine. We populate the pages
with data from the database, and as long as the charset is correctly
configured, there is no need for &eacute; etc.

A lot of &___; characters are defined in Internet Explorer but don't work in
Netscape, such as &ndash;

Perhaps the lang tagging is useful for people with speaking web browsers - I
don't know if it is useful for visual browsers at this time.

hope that helps

John Pye
www.creativebase.com

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Peter Van Dijck
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 4:10 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] dealing with spanish / international characters

Hi,
is the following true? (I'm making this up again from what I've understood)

The character set and the language are seperate in HTML.

In the beginning of the doc you specify which language the doc is in:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
(EN is english)
You can also insert
<html lan="en"> in the html tag to show the doc is in english.

If you want to insert Spanish within that English document, you do this:
Hi people, I <span lang="es">hablo</span> Spanish!
So screenreaders can pronounce that word Spanish.

Special characters should be done like this:
&eacute;
an e with an accent on it
&iquest;
an inverse question mark.

If you want to use a special character set (like hebrew or chinese), you do
it like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-8">
The user will need to have this character set installed.

Is this all correct? It's confusing me...
Peter

---------------------------------------
For unsubscribe and other options, including
the Tip Harvester and archive of TheList go to:
http://lists.evolt.org Workers of the Web, evolt !