[Web4lib] RSS and diacritics

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Jonathan Gorman wrote:

> >One other question:  which numeric reference is preferable?  For 
> >example, both É and É (xC9 and 201) produce a Latin capital 
> >E acute.  Are there good reasons to use one over the other?  (And is 
> >either more likely than the other to be correctly rendered by 
> >browsers in non-RSS situations?)
> 
> That, I must say, is for either a linguist or a character set expert to 
> answer ;).  

I might claim to be the latter... The two are equivalent. Hexadecimal C9 
is equivalent to decimal 201. I would expect any software that handles RSS 
to handle either notation equally well.

(By the way, the Windows calculator can do conversions between hex and 
decimal. Do Start:Run:Calc.)

(By the other way, the Windows character map utility if useful also. Do 
Start:Run:charmap.)

> As a general rule, I try to avoid combining diacritics, but 
> that's just me.

Just to make sure there's no confusion, these are not combining 
diacritics, they are combined. The combining equivalent would be to output 
an "E" followed by the character entity for a combining acute, which is 
hex 301.

That stated, I agree, use combined if possible, not combining.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

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