[thelist] List of illegal characters

[Bruce Wilbur]

Michael Mell wrote:
> Bruce, your list has characters for &# 130 - 159. I believe these are illegal. To validly display those characters, you need to use unicode numbers.
>
> Here is where I found the information:
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html
>

In some ways that's a nicer list than the one I referred to.  It doesn't, however, show you what the character looks like.  If one can see what the offending character looks like, it's easier (for some of us anyway) to hunt it down in the text, either visually or through find-and-replace.  That's why I included that first reference--not as a guide to what's legal, but to provide a visual reference for those that aren't.

And there's a whole other set of characters that need to be converted when the client supplies text created on a Mac.  At least my clients anyway.  (Who knows how they do these things?)

As for Unicode, I wouldn't know one if it reared up and bit me in the a**.    I use the &#xxxx; character entity references.  They seem to work just fine back to IE4 and NN4 and pass both the W3C's HTML and CSS validators.  If they're Unicode, then I learned something.  If they're not, I'm not sure I care because they work.

Yours,
B