History of dash character support

**Andreas Prilop** · Jul 20 '05, 03:18 PM

Re: History of dash character support

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger@co mcast.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
> X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106
>
> How far back in their version history did Netscape and Internet Explorer
> support — and – codes for em and en dashes in text?[/color]

Who cares? (Since – and — are undefined expressions.)

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html

[color=blue]
> Veuillez ?ter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.[/color]

How far ahead in its future history will Outlook Express support MIME
by default?

--

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/plonk.txt

**Andreas Prilop** · Jul 20 '05, 03:18 PM

Re: History of dash character support

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger@co mcast.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
> X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106
>
> How far back in their version history did Netscape and Internet Explorer
> support — and – codes for em and en dashes in text?[/color]

Who cares? (Since – and — are undefined expressions.)

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html

[color=blue]
> Veuillez ?ter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.[/color]

How far ahead in its version future will Outlook Express support MIME
by default?

--

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/plonk.txt

**Alan J. Flavell** · Jul 20 '05, 03:18 PM

Re: History of dash character support

On Wed, Jul 23, Harlan Messinger inscribed on the eternal scroll:
[color=blue]
> How far back in their version history did Netscape and Internet Explorer
> support — and – codes for em and en dashes in text?[/color]

It's hard to discuss "support" for something that officially doesn't
exist.

IE claims to be an operating system component: it disqualifies itself
as a WWW browser in various ways.

"Netscape" (whatever you suppose that to be) is a cross-platform
browser which confuses some authors by displaying - on SOME of the
supported platforms - what the author wanted in response to &#number;
references between 128 and 159 decimal inclusive, instead of
displaying a bogosity alert as it should have done. See the
demoroniser web site for a more trenchant account of the situation.
[color=blue]
> In ALT attributes? In TITLE tags?[/color]

Even worse.
[color=blue]
> Veuillez ôter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.[/color]

zut alors. I don't discern any MIME header and charset= declaration
in your posting headers, so you appear to have a parity error in your
us-ascii code. Are you unaware that there are open, published,
interworking specifications that relate to these issues?

**Harlan Messinger** · Jul 20 '05, 03:19 PM

Re: History of dash character support

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.c ern.ch> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4 .53.03072401442 40.29244@lxplus 068.cern.ch...[color=blue]
> On Wed, Jul 23, Harlan Messinger inscribed on the eternal scroll:
>[color=green]
> > How far back in their version history did Netscape and Internet Explorer
> > support — and – codes for em and en dashes in text?[/color]
>
> It's hard to discuss "support" for something that officially doesn't
> exist.[/color]

Well, that seems to be a funny way to look at it, since every application
"supports" every one of its stated features whether or not those features
conform to or have any relation to any standard.

But thanks to all for pointing out the fallacy of my question--I didn't
realize that these weren't universal codes for dashes.

**Andreas Prilop** · Jul 20 '05, 03:19 PM

Re: History of dash character support

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger@co mcast.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
> My Outlook Express configuration tells me that my encoding is "Western
> European (ISO)", so I'm surprised.[/color]

This only means that Outlook Express regards your bytes as ISO-8859-1
characters. Additionally, you should choose

Tools > Options > Send
Mail Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
News Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
Encode text using: None

--

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/plonk.txt

**Harlan Messinger** · Jul 20 '05, 03:19 PM

Re: History of dash character support

"Andreas Prilop" <nhtcapri@rrz n-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote in message
news:2407200319 30597519%nhtcap ri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de...[color=blue]
> "Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger@co mcast.net> wrote:
>[color=green]
> > My Outlook Express configuration tells me that my encoding is "Western
> > European (ISO)", so I'm surprised.[/color]
>
> This only means that Outlook Express regards your bytes as ISO-8859-1
> characters. Additionally, you should choose
>
> Tools > Options > Send
> Mail Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
> News Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
> Encode text using: None
>[/color]

Ah. Funny, it was set that way for mail, but not for news.

**Henri Sivonen** · Jul 20 '05, 03:25 PM

Re: History of dash character support

In article <Pine.LNX.4.53. 0308031944210.1 5409@lxplus004. cern.ch>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.c ern.ch> wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Sun, Aug 3, Henri Sivonen inscribed on the eternal scroll:
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> > > "Netscape" (whatever you suppose that to be) is a cross-platform
> > > browser which confuses some authors by displaying - on SOME of the
> > > supported platforms - what the author wanted in response to &#number;
> > > references between 128 and 159 decimal inclusive,[/color]
> >
> > On which supported platforms it doesn't?[/color]
>
> Traditionally, X-Windows platforms came with strictly iso-8859-1
> fonts: when presented with the control characters in the range
> x80-x9f they would display either nothing at all (not even an empty
> space), or some place-holder or error glyph.[/color]

Netscape has "supported" the bogus NCRs by assuming them to be CP1252
code point references and using ASCII surrogates on X since Netscape 4.5
or perhaps even earlier.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi

Henri Sivonen's pages

http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html