does a charset make a difference?

[richard]

I was attempting to get a webpage design going using simple iframes.
It wouldn't cut it for nuthin.
Couldn't understand why.
I had the charset in note tab light set to iso-8859-1 and all it would
was to set the iframe defaults. Nothing more.

Tried acehtml and all of a sudden it worked as wanted?
Ah hah! acehtml had a charset of windows-1252.

Why does the charset make such a big difference as to what works?

BTW, this was using firefox.

 

[Harlan Messinger]

I was attempting to get a webpage design going using simple iframes.
It wouldn't cut it for nuthin.
Couldn't understand why.
I had the charset in note tab light set to iso-8859-1 and all it would
was to set the iframe defaults. Nothing more.

Tried acehtml and all of a sudden it worked as wanted?
Ah hah! acehtml had a charset of windows-1252.

Why does the charset make such a big difference as to what works?

If your editor encodes a particular character as nnnn and your browser
thinks nnnn is the encoding of a different character, then it's going to
display the wrong character.

Of course, I don't know specifically having a charset "in note tab light
set to iso-8859-1" means, nor what it means for acehtml to "have" a
charset of windows-1252, and I don't know what actual input and outcome
you so vaguely describe as "it wouldn't cut it for nuthin" or what you
mean by "all it would was to set the iframe defaults" so I can't give
you any more specific an answer.

 

[dorayme]

If your editor encodes a particular character as nnnn and your browser
thinks nnnn is the encoding of a different character, then it's going to
display the wrong character.

Of course, I don't know specifically having a charset "in note tab light
set to iso-8859-1" means, nor what it means for acehtml to "have" a
charset of windows-1252, and I don't know what actual input and outcome
you so vaguely describe as "it wouldn't cut it for nuthin" or what you
mean by "all it would was to set the iframe defaults" so I can't give
you any more specific an answer.

OP should really direct all his questions primarily to his greatest fan,
Andy Dingley. AD has a special kind of rapport with this OP.

I am not suggesting OP should not CC the rest of us.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

I think you may need to calibrate your troll-o-meter.

This didn't ring the bell either?

If your editor encodes a particular character as nnnn and your browser
thinks nnnn is the encoding of a different character, then it's going
to display the wrong character.

Probably yes, but anyone who wants to understand this would already have
checked what charset _means_ before asking "does a charset make a
difference", instead of posting a public message with a very trollish
look.

Of course, I don't know specifically having a charset "in note tab
light set to iso-8859-1" means, nor what it means for acehtml to
"have" a charset of windows-1252,

Well, _that_ looks pretty clear to me: those statements refer to the
character encoding that the program has been configured or instructed to
use when saving the data in a file. For some odd reason, the apparent
troll didn't manage to obfuscate this.

and I don't know what actual input
and outcome you so vaguely describe as "it wouldn't cut it for
nuthin" or what you mean by "all it would was to set the iframe
defaults" so I can't give you any more specific an answer.

So the trolling wasn't quite perfect. We could get more trolled and
explain that the difference between iso-8859-1 and windows-1252 exists
in relatively few code positions only and would generally go unnoticed,
since most browsers, when told that data is iso-8859-1 encoded, will in
fact treat it was windows-1252 encoded. I guess Opera has a _settable
option_ of actually treating iso-8859-1 as iso-8859-1...

But maybe we should just ignore trolls?

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

So the trolling wasn't quite perfect.

It is, after all, RtS... <chuckle>