Everything you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask!

There are several character coding standards one can use for documents that include South Slavic characters. Their use depends on the hardware/operating system platform used, as well as on the intended purpose. This document concentrates on the issues important for Windows platforms and documents written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

The reasons for not seeing South Slavic characters in a HTML document correctly may be:

• Document header does not contain all the necessary information needed.
• Document codes do not comply with the standard specified in the document's header, or comply with some 'standard' that is perhaps no standard at all.
• Your browser is not capable of interpreting and reacting to the coding information from the document's header.
• Your font (that your browser uses as a correct action on the document header information) does not correspond to the standard used in the document.

Check the source of the document. Look for a 'Content-Type' meta line in the header. If this line is not present, then:

• It means that you can test the document only on-line. If you save it and try to read it, the chances are your browser will not know that a special font is to be used.
• If the server on which the document is published does not provide the right Content-Type information, and this information is lacking in the document header too, than the maintainer of the document has definitely made a serious omission.
• You might wish to notify the maintainer of the document of this problem. You might also wish to save the document at your place and add the necessary meta-line to its header, in order to be able to read it correctly from the saved copy. To do this, you have to be sure which coding scheme has been used in the document... see below.

A WWW HTML-compliant document that contains South Slavic characters is most probably written to be compatible either with ISO-8859-2 or MS-CP1250 standard. If no 'Content-Type' meta line is present in the header, the only way to prove definitely which of the two has been used is to search for characters s<, S<, z< or Z< and compare their codes to those cited in the above tables. These are, namely, the characters that have different code values in these two standards.

Do not believe what the document author says in some comment or note about the character set used. Test it! (I myself once stated in some 60 documents (total of 4MB) that they were coded in ISO-8859-2 standard, where in fact it was a simple Microsoft MS-CP1250! This false header infos were on-line for four months.) Do not believe the author's Content-Type meta-line (if it is there at all). Test it!

Now that you know exactly what coding scheme has been used in a document and see if meta-line corresponds to this scheme or not, you can check your browser and font setup...

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South Slavic Literature Library http://www.borut.com/library
Maintained by Borut Maricic http://www.borut.com

Last update: 13 February, 1998 (update note on 1999-08-30; minor change 1999-09-14)

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