Re: [xml-dev] Display of character 0x96 (#150) in IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and Mac

[richard@inf.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)]

In article <74a894af0604210137s387076f9o8fb29f42a6f9dc22@mail.gmail.com> you write:
>In the XML spec it states that the parser must only resolve character
>references using Unicode - so why do the browsers render #150 as a
>dash?

How does a browser go about rendering a character?  If it's not a
special character it knows about, it will just display it using the
current font.  Presumably the font that it is using has a dash at that
position, quite likely because it was assembled to cover Unicode from
a number of separate existing fonts one of which was intended to be
used for both the Windows encoding and Latin-1.

I doubt that (X)HTML specifies anything about how the &#150; character
should be rendered, in which case the browser isn't technically wrong.
It's the document author who has made a mistake.  But it would be
preferable if the browser used a font that didn't hide the error.

-- Richard