Windows CP-1252

This character range is reserved for “system control characters” by the ISO-8859-1 standard. Most web browsers support these characters in the Windows position, but they should properly be expressed as Latin-1 entities.  6:43:58 PM    

Posting high-ASCII from a Mac, revisited

Well, after all of the problems I've had, I'd never have guessed that posting non-ISO characters to a PC web server would work.

I just discovered, by accident, that I can type curly quotes and m-dashes right in the Edit this Page field, and post them correctly to a Manila server running on Windows. I confirmed this on my ancient weblog at http://zajac.editthispage.com.

It all now makes sense. I'm convinced that the problem is that string.latinToMac works right! All Mac web browsers (except Mozilla) seem to send these characters encoded using the Windows CP-1252 extensions to ISO-8859-1, but string.latinToMac doesn't know about the extensions, and scrambles these characters.

Since this range of characters is not used for anything else in ISO-8859-1, this could be fixed by changing string.latinToMac (which is a kernel verb). Then Mac Manila servers would behave the same way as PC servers. Actually, it will behave slightly better, since it will send correct Latin entities for most characters instead of CP-1252 characters, thanks to html.data.iso8859.mac.

Output to HTML is better on Mac servers

If these characters are entered correctly in the database of a Mac server—by editing in the root directly, or posting through a Mac copy of Radio—then the mac-iso filter correctly converts them to Latin character entities, according to the table at html.data.iso8859.mac.

PC servers support these characters natively, and echo them back to the web page. They display correctly on most web browsers, even though they are not using the HTML standard. This could easily be fixed by adding the 128-159 range to html.data.iso8859.win.

The table at html.data.iso8859.mac does have a couple of bugs, however. The ellipsis (…), n-dash (–) and solidus (fraction slash: ⁄) get replaced by three periods(...), a hyphen (-) and a regular slash (/), respectively. If someone goes to the trouble of typing these, why not replace them with the correct Latin entity?   5:57:33 PM    

But I'm also a stickler for details, and I like tinkering with systems that help things work the way I want them to. Luckily, I've learned to type some HTML tags very quickly.

I was surprised to see that the *** at the front of a line no longer makes it bold. This was a long-standing shortcut in Frontir and Manila. I guess Radio's had some work done to the default pagefilter code.

On most of the Manila sites I manage, I turn off the WYSIWYG editor and install the shorthand plugin. It makes it easy for non-HTML folks to do some basic structure and formatting.

I'm hoping to plug BBEdit into Radio & Manila, but no time now. Michael Himsolt is already working on it.   4:53:00 PM    

Dave Winer asks why bother with CSS if you ascribe to dogma 2000.

I'm trying out Dogma 2000 right now. Just typing as I think.

But doesn't Radio Userland make D2K obsolete? I'm just typing as I think, but my page will look quite nice. I don't even have to run an ftp client, just click the post button.

Who cares if it looks good because Bryan Bell made the template using HTML or HTML plus CSS?   4:39:15 PM