On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Tom Gewecke wrote:
> >I have added a couple more variations of the Unicode supplementary
> >characters example page, for utf-16 and utf-32.
>
> I had the impression that it was not really practical to use web pages with
> these encodings over the internet, because they do not preserve ascii and
> are not compatible with html. Could someone enlighten me on this?
UTF-16 and UTF-32 have drawbacks you mentioned and may not be
practical. (Personally, I would never put up html files in those encodings
other than for testing purpose.) Nonetheless, neither of them is forbidden
by any standard. Actually, W3 html standard explicitly mentions them
as possible encodings for html files.
With BOM at the beginning, Netscape 4.x, Netscape 6.x/Mozilla and MS
IE 5.x/6.x can handle them without much problem except that support
for characters above BMP varies from browser to browser as Tex tried to
demonstrate in his test pages. IIRC, none of those browsers has UTF-16
and UTF-32 'visible' in 'Encoding' menu. UTF-16 and UTF-32 entries in
'Encoding' menu get 'exposed' only when users try to view UTF-16 and
UTF-32 encoded pages.
Jungshik Shin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Apr 19 2002 - 11:38:25 EDT