Re: reply to Robert Holmgren on memory problems, digest #137

[Carl Distefano CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Richard Giering 
Sat, 20 Jun 1998 10:56:01 -0500

-> Question about the use of the character set and HTML: 1) When
-> the character set with German Umlauts is used under XYWRITE,
-> will it transfer into HTML especially E-Mail? 2) When using
-> that character set, what are the keys associated with the
-> German characters?

Your question is hard to decipher. Which character set? Transfer
how? Keys associated where?

If your question is whether the extended Ascii umlaut characters can
be used in an HTML document to be viewed in a Web browser, or can be
transmitted via E-mail, the answer is no on both counts. Most
browsers will recognize HTML codings for accented characters,
consisting of sequences beginning with an ampersand (&) and ending
with a semicolon. For example, a lowercase a-umlaut would be
written as "ä". HTML documents often employ, and many browsers
can handle, recognized charsets such as Latin-1, or ISO-8859-1,
which contains the characters used by most Western European
languages. In that charset, a-umlaut is (I think) char No. 228, and
would appear in the HTML source as "ä". (HTML is designed to
handle all characters in the Universal Character Set, which is
character-by-character equivalent to Unicode.) Bottom line, if an
HTML document includes Ascii accented characters, they display as
gibberish.

As to E-mail, some mail servers will preserve accented and other
extended-Ascii characters, but many won't, so that the transmission
of such characters via E-mail is unreliable. The only safe thing is
to stick to the Ascii range that all servers recognize (32-128), and
to resort to workarounds for higher-order characters (e.g., "ae" for
a-umlaut, etc.).

If your question re "keys" is where are they mapped in the default
XyWrite keyboard, why not just CAll up the keyboard file and look
for yourself?

Well, I've answered my own questions, but maybe not yours. Could
you be more specific?


--------------
Carl Distefano
CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/