Re: SIS browser

[Joe Kohn <joko@NoMoreSpam.net.invalid>]

Since Shareware Solutions II has been chosen by Geoff Weiss to be the new
publisher of the Spectrum Internet Suite web browser, I took the liberty
of forwarding your question along to Geoff, and the following is his
response:
 
Actually, the IIgs behaves exactly as Netscape if there is no language tag
in the header or text.  Most web pages are written on the PC and uses the
Windows character set for the high-bit characters.  As you know, this
isn't compatible with the Mac/IIgs character set.  You will find that the
Mac and UNIX versions of Netscape will display characters incorrectly on
the same pages which the IIgs shows the wrong charcter.  The HTML
standards say that the web page author must use the &character; notation
for foreign character compatibility across all Browsers.  I do not believe
SIS is in error.  It would be nice for SIS to support other character sets
such as ISO-8859-1 and the like, but very few authors specify the language
type in their document to make this truely worthwhile. 
 
I browse documents from the UNIX version of Netscape Navigator at home and
work and see incorrect characters all the time.  I don't use the Mac
enough to make a comparison.  But since the character set is "broken" on
UNIX, it has to be broken on the IIgs too.  There is many characters which
are in the Windows and ISO-8859-1 character set which don't exist on the
IIgs to add to the complexity of the issue as well.  SIS would also be
slower if it supports multiple character sets since every charcter would
have to go through a conversion process (for comparison if it needs to
changed) on the IIgs. 
 
If you wrote a document on a Mac and have some of the Mac high character
sets, it will show up correctly on the Mac and IIgs.  You will get strange
results on the Windows and UNIX.  We are living in a world which is biased
against Apples (and UNIX) and we just have to live with it unless we
switch to Windows. 
 
-------
Joe Kohn
http://users.foxvalley.net/~joko



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