capoccia's Journal: Slashdot Needs Unicode Support

I was going to copy my latest 'blog entry here, but the topic, "Basic HTML Typography," means almost none of it will show up.

The W3C Standards non-compliance is appalling for a 'nerds' site. Slashdot claims to be written in HTML 3.2, but it uses features from later versions that aren't available in 3.2.

In addition to the standards non-compliance in HTML, the comment/journal filtering methods prevent one from using standard typographic symbols to punctuate your prose.

No opening & closing quotes, no primes, no en or em dashes, no minus signs and no elipses. Each of these can be approximated with ASCII characters, but it's high time Slashdot supports the real thing.

But this is only a small subset of the characters available. I would like to see Slashdot move to full Unicode support. Even if they keep their encoding at iso-8859-1, I should be able to enter the number codes for any character I want.

What a pipe dream--the editors can't even figure out how to spell or prevent dup's.

Just a guess

[dolo666]

... but I don't think XHTML 1.0 supports these things, so why should Slashdot?

If anything, Slashdot should move to XHTML 1.0 Strict with CSS, like this site [jcomserv.net]. Users should not be able to write HTML in their posts -- that should be systemic. Covert links -- that's all you'd have to do to comply with XHTML.

Unicode in XHTML

[capoccia]

There are only a few characters not suitable [unicode.org] for XHTML, such as the line and paragraph separator (br & p should be used) or the language tag codepoints (lang should be used) are not allowed. Everything else is legal [unicode.org].

And no umlauts

[Cujo]

So, how I 'm supposed spell Mssbauer? I mean Moessbauer (no, don't like that either).

Hmm...they need to refactor the mod system, too. Everything shows its age eventually.