HTML entities for the Macintosh character set

Nov. 5, 2000 by ssl@prefab.com (Scott S. Lawton)

Summary: map HTML entities and ISO8859 charset used by Windows, UNIX, etc. to/from Macintosh (whose upper ASCII was created prior to the ISO spec).

The first 2 columns represent my attempt to find entities that work, regardless of any formal standard; the 3rd column shows what your browser does. (Why don't all such tables have this feature?) The next 2 columns help those who use UserLand Frontier evaluate whether my lookup table might be a suitable replacement for Frontier's built-in table. The final 2 columns are for that impossible audience: browser developers. iCab supports these; do you?

The best source I found on this topic is a far more extensive set of tables at http://www.siber-sonic.com/mac/charsetstuff/Soniccharset.html. The one thing that's missing from there is what I provide here: a simple lookup table organized according to the Mac charset order. (Well, plus I include some extra information for Frontier folks.)

Frontier notes: I'm using my table (4K ".sit" file) as a replacement for html.data.iso8859.mac. I made 4 types of changes: 1. replaced 'lower ASCII' mappings (e.g. curly quotes) with entities. 2. replaced bracketed text with entities (except for the 12 for which I couldn't find a match). 3. If an entity name worked in the 3 browsers that I have handy (Netscape 4.61, MSIE 4.01 and iCab Pre2.1), I used that rather than the ISO-8859 number. 4. If there was no ISO-8859 number, I used the Unicode number. I also include the Unicode name just for reference, however, those don't work in my test versions of Netscape and MSIE. (I realize there are newer versions of both, but I'm too busy to download the latest bloatware.)

By the way, there's now a free, open source version of Frontier.

Minor update July 18, 2005