Posted by Karl C. on 05/17/07 18:15

"Toby A Inkster" <usenet200703@tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote in message
news:g6rqh4-8oj.ln1@ophelia.g5n.co.uk...
> Karl C. wrote:
>
>> I'dd like to know which is the prefered code to display the umlaut mark,
>> is
>> it in decimal code &#235 or the entity &euml;?
>>
>> I have one page using iso-8859-1 where I just use the normal character
>> '�'
>> but the other site uses utf-8 which asks for unicode.
>
> If you're using ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8, then you can just type � straight
> into the file -- no need to reference it in any special way. This is
> because both of those encodings include the � character.
>
> You only need to use an entity or character reference such as &euml; or
> &#235; when you're working in an encoding that doesn't include �. Examples
> of such encodings are US-ASCII and Shift-JIS.
>
> For example, say you're working on an HTML file in US-ASCII encoding.
> US-ASCII is a fairly old character set with support for only about 100
> printable characters. In particular, it doesn't include any characters
> with diacritic marks (a.k.a. "accents") So because you can't represent �
> directly in the file, you can use one of HTML's methods of representing
> that character:
>
> &euml;
> &#235;
> &#xEB;
>
> That way, the file is still valid US-ASCII, as you've not directly
> included the non-US-ASCII character � -- you've only included an ampersand
> (&) and a few other characters, all of which are valid US-ASCII
> characters.
> But an HTML User-Agent, which "mentally converts" all the files it reads
> into Unicode, will know to read the entity as �.
>
> With regard to which you should use, it doesn't really matter except in
> some exceptional circumstances.
>
> Circumstance 1: Hexadecimal character references (ones beginning with
> "&#x") tend to have slightly poorer support in some very old browsers, so
> if you need to support those, then stick to the mnemonic entities (&euml;)
> and decimal character references (&#235;).
>
> Circumstance 2: XML only has five mnemonic character entities -- "&amp;",
> "&gt;", "&lt;", "&quot;" and "&apos;". Others can be defined, but should
> not be relied on as they require the processing agent to read the DTD to
> understand what they are. Many agents do not read the DTD (formally, they
> don't have to), so will not understand the entities. For this reason, it's
> wise to stick to only using numeric character references in XML, except
> for
> "&amp;", "&gt;", "&lt;" and "&quot;". (I leave out "&apos;" because
> Internet Explorer doesn't support it -- use "&#39;" instead.) As XHTML is
> a variety of XML, this advice applies to XHTML too.
>
> --
> Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
> http://tobyinkster.co.uk/
> Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux

Thanks for this informative answer, I've now decided to use &euml; to
represent '�'. I can only hope the three major searchengines Google, Yahoo
and MSN, respond well to it.

You've mentioned to put in the '�' character right away, I tried that, but
when using UTF-8 I have all the difficulties getting the page validated on
W3C, it actually stops checking the page because of these characters.
Without these '�' characters the page validates perfectly using XHTML
Transitional (even XHTML1.1).

I knew how to fix it, but the multiple choices to solve the same problem got
me confused, it is why I was asking which one of these alternatives would be
the prefered one.

Thanks once again!

Karl

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