[xsl] OT: Special Characters in NS 4

Subject: [xsl] OT: Special Characters in NS 4
From: Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 17:32:08 -0600 (MDT)
Passin, Tom wrote:
> [Rowlinson, Nicole SLGA]
> > Thanks for your replies.  The only thing I am unsure of is why numeric
> > entities like &#160; worked in IE 5.5, but in IE 6 it must be 
> > changed to 
> > <xsl:text 
> > disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>.  I know that
> > IE 6 is supposed to be more "compliant" but I'm not sure what 
> > is wrong with
> > using the number code values.
> 
> This is not correct.  The character reference & # 160; __does__ produce
> a non-breaking space in IE6 (I just tried it in service pack 1).  The
> only reason there might be a problem in displaying is a character
> encoding mismatch.  Not only that, it must be that the character
> reference (& # 160;) must have been converted to an character character
> as the html was created, because a numerical character reference in the
> html file is independent of the encoding (at least, it is supposed to
> be!).  

The piece of junk known as Netscape 4 incorrectly uses the interpreted
encoding of the page as the basis for interpreting numeric character
references above 127. So if the encoding chosen for the intrepretation of the
document's bytes as characters is one that maps byte 160 to something other
than a no-break space character, and if the font supports it, then that's what
will render.

As you (sort of) noted, the correct behavior would be for the reference to be
interpreted as a Unicode code point, where 160 is always a no-break space.
This is not an issue in any modern browser.

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/browsers.html documents the Unicode support in
a fair number of browsers. Definitely check there for further info about these
kinds of bugs.

-Mike


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