ISO8859-1/HTML stuff

This area was created at a time when iso-8859-1 was the HTML character set. Over time, various other character set issues crept in. I'm now dealing with internationalisation issues in a separate area; this part just contains matters related reasonably closely to iso-8859-1, and some residual historical issues that didn't seem worth taking up in the new area.

Up to and including HTML3.2, the document character set and the default transmission encoding were iso-8859-1, and this was the only coding that a browser would have to implement in order to satisfy the specifications. In practice, many browsers supported other character encodings to some useful extent, but that lies outside of the scope of this particular discussion.

My original motivation for setting up this area was to offer a briefing on the iso-8859-1 character set and its intended usage in HTML, and to demonstrate the extent to which authors could (or could not) rely on it having been implemented correctly, or at all, in the browsers available at various times. Many (though not quite all) of those historical problems have been resolved over time, leaving room of course for some new ones...

A briefing/tutorial on character codes, with pointers to other resources.
Quick start: my FAQ section
ISO-8859-1 and the Mac
An earlier report on some popular browsers, developed at a time when support for the iso-8859-1 characters was quite patchy (nowadays this shouldn't be so much of a problem, but it still does no harm to follow the advice given there).
Notes and preface to the test tables (available as a table or as a preformatted file) used for producing the above report. (Can also be used as an aide-memoire to the upper half of the ISO8859-1 table and entity names).
After I had produced the above material for my own purposes, I discovered that an essentially equivalent table had already been provided by Martin Ramsch at Uni-Passau, and includes some additional pointers to valuable resources on this topic.

Now moved to charset area:

Notes on Internationalization of HTML

I was also muttering on usenet about some earlier contact with techniques facilitating the internationalisation of messages in software applications.