ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

[Andy Dingley]

Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?
This gains the Euro symbol, but obviously loses the £ sign (and a few
other less useful symbols)

[Martin Honnen]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

Andy Dingley wrote:

Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?
This gains the Euro symbol, but obviously loses the £ sign (and a few
other less useful symbols)

The pound symbol "£" is in both ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15. The Euro
symbol "€" in ISO-8859-15 replaces the currency symbol "¤" that is in
ISO-8859-1.

--

Martin Honnen

http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Helmut Wollmersdorfer]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

Andy Dingley wrote:

Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?

ISO-8859-15 was before it was born.

This gains the Euro symbol, but obviously loses the £ sign (and a few
other less useful symbols)

If you only need "Euro" then use the ISO 3-letter currency code "EUR"
which is very well known around the whole world, and is usable in nearly
all encodings.

I am not a friend of MS, but Windows-1252 has the Euro symbol, and
avoids the disadvantages of ISO-8859-15.

You should use UNICODE/UTF-8 or decimal entities:
U+20AC EURO SIGN
UTF-8: 0xE2 0x82 0xAC
decimal entity: €

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

[Henri Sivonen]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

In article <1169828860.245 271.14420@v45g2 000cwv.googlegr oups.com>,
"Andy Dingley" <dingbat@codesm iths.comwrote:

Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?

Yes.

* It is harmful for sniffers that assume content to be in one of
US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 or UTF-8.

* There are legacy browsers that support ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 but don't
support ISO-8859-15.

Please use UTF-8 instead. ISO-8859-15 is a politically motivated
technical error and anachronism.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

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

[Bart Lateur]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

Andy Dingley wrote:

>Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
>encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?
>This gains the Euro symbol, but obviously loses the £ sign (and a few
>other less useful symbols)

Characters (in the upper region) move around. That's a big gotcha.

--
Bart.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

Scripsit Bart Lateur:

>Are there any non-obvious gotchas to using ISO-8859-15 as a page
>encoding rather than ISO-8859-1 ?
>This gains the Euro symbol, but obviously loses the £ sign (and a few
>other less useful symbols)

>
Characters (in the upper region) move around. That's a big gotcha.

No, they don't. ISO-8859-15 replaces a handful of characters in ISO-8859-1
by other characters (which are not present in ISO-8859-1). There's no moving
around.

ISO-8859-15 is simply pointless in www authoring, since any browser that
understands it can also handle UTF-8 (but not vice versa), and the few
characters that are different from ISO-8859-1 can easily be written as
entity or character references in HTML. Whenever you wonder whether you
should use ISO-8859-15, you should really ask yourself whether you should
use ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Andy Dingley]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

On 26 Jan, 16:40, Martin Honnen <mahotr...@yaho o.dewrote:

The pound symbol "£" is in both ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.

Thanks Martin - I'd just mis-read my listings.

I can't say "use UTF-8" instead because I'm already saying that. This
is just for the section of the notes applying to those customers
specifically insisting on ISO-8859-something instead of UTF-8 (don't
ask me why, they just do).

I have _no_ idea what to say to the one insisting on using CP-1256 on
Solaris....

[Andreas Prilop]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Andy Dingley wrote:

>
I can't say "use UTF-8" instead because I'm already saying that. This
is just for the section of the notes applying to those customers
specifically insisting on ISO-8859-something instead of UTF-8 (don't
ask me why, they just do).

It's not quite clear what you are talking about:
Do you speak of the encoding (charset) of web pages (which is a
subject of this group)?
Or do you speak of the character set used on the computers of
your customers (which is not a subject of this group)?

I have _no_ idea what to say to the one insisting on using CP-1256 on
Solaris....

In Solaris 9, there are Arabic fonts in
/usr/openwin/lib/locale/ar/X11/fonts/TrueType/

[Andreas Prilop]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

On Sat, 27 Jan 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

ISO-8859-15 is simply pointless in www authoring,
[...]
Whenever you wonder whether you should use
ISO-8859-15, you should really ask yourself whether you should use ISO-8859-1
or UTF-8.

.... or Windows-1252 (code page 1252), which covers all characters of
ISO-8859-1 and -15 and which is supported by all (?) browsers.

[Andy Dingley]

Re: ISO-8859-15 vs. ISO-8859-1 ?

On 29 Jan, 14:48, Andreas Prilop <AndreasPrilop2 ...@trashmail.n et>
wrote:

Do you speak of the encoding (charset) of web pages (which is a
subject of this group)?
Or do you speak of the character set used on the computers of
your customers (which is not a subject of this group)?

Both. I build webapps, the local servers _are_ my customers'
computers and thus control the page encodings I must work with.