Re: Offtopic: Web Standards Project

Richard Tobin (richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 15:01:06 +0100 (BST)

> [BTW, when using US-ASCII as an entity character encoding, must one
> declare it as UTF-8, and use other means to ensure that multi-byte
> characters don't occur?]

You don't *have* to declare it at all, since UTF-8 is the default. If
you do declare it, you can use any of the ascii supersets you mention,
but only UTF-8 is required to be recognised.

For English documents you might also use ISO-8859-1, on the grounds
that it's quite common to find apparently ascii documents that have
been enlivened with a soupon of other western European languages.

You *could* declare it to be US-ASCII, which is an IANA-registered
name, but I wouldn't count on many processors recognising it.

-- Richard