Re: Using character entities in us-ascii

Leif K-Brooks <eurleif (AT) ecritters (DOT) biz> wrote:

You're specifying the US-ASCII encoding for this document, but HTML as a
whole uses the Unicode character set

Ian <blank (AT) blank (DOT) com> posted:

Okay, I think I get it. I was looking at the W3C list of character
entities early, which looked like it was showing part of the HTML
4.01 DTD. The named entities were being converted into numeric
Unicode. This was initially what worried me, but I think I see
what you mean. I always thought a character entity "stood for" the
equivalent in whatever encoding you're using, so if you state
you're using an encoding that doesn't support that character
entity, it wouldn't get rendered in the browser. This doesn't seem
to be the case, though. It looks like character entities are part
of HTML in general, just like you can use &amp; in an XML document
without declaring it as an entity, since XML has that as a
default. I may be on the wrong track here, though.

When you encode the letter "A" as character number 65 in ASCII (I'm doing
that from memory, so it not be 65), it's a *representation* of what you
want in the document (as is everything that you type). When you use &copy;
it's a representation of what you want in the document (a copyright
symbol). These are, if you like, *input* encodings.

What the browser is capable of outputting depends on what it can support,
separate from what you gave it as a source document. It'll depend on the
browser's understanding, the fonts available, and the system.

As a general rule, few browsers produce ASCII output. They produce their
output in the native format for the system they're running on. So, unless
the source document was already using the same scheme, there's at least one
translation involved.

e.g. Input --> browser's internal handling --> Displayed output

The input encoding *only* limits what can be directly typed into it (as
individual characters). You can type in references to use characters that
can't be typed directly (e.e. there's no copyright symbol in ASCII, but the
reference for it uses characters that are available in ASCII - the letters
in & c o p y

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