Re: [tlug] JIS X 0212? Any example "mixed charset" pages?

[Godwin Stewart <godwin.stewart@example.com>]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 10:25:24 +0100, "Yo Sato" <yosato16@example.com> wrote:

> This is something I have been noticing but which left me wondering:
> 
> How can a web page refer to the characters outside the code set which
> it uses?

The code set it uses, ie: that which is in the Content-Type meta, is
merely what the client browser is to assume non-ascii characters are
encoded in, not necessarily what it's meant to display.

So, <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=foo">
means "the source of this page is encoded in charset foo, but you are
supposed to display whatever charset is used on the client system".

> Even if it uses entity references, it still seem to me to require some
> behind-the-scene trick... like, using utf8 just for those
> characters...

If the client host uses UTF-8 internally then that is what will be used.

If, OTOH, the client host has no support for anything other than, say,
ISO-8859-15, then you can use whatever Japanese encoding scheme you
like and Japanese text will still not be displayed because, as
mentioned earlier, the <meta> tag only informs the browser about how it
is to *interpret* the HTML source, not how it is supposed to render it.

-- 
G. Stewart - godwin.stewart@example.com

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
               -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

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