There are two ways to get accented characters onto an html page.

The wrong way is to enter a character code directly from your keyboard. For example, here's character %E9:

é

Now, that may look like this ...

eacute.png

... on your PC, but different computers use different character codes, so on a Mac it'll look like this ...

Icirc.png

... and by the time it's printed it'll probably be just a letter i.

So, what's the solution? How can we all end up typing in harmony?

Well, the answer is to use html entities. Entities start with an amperstand (&), have the name of the character in the middle, and end with a semi-colon (;).

So, the proper way to get an e-acute in html is to use the entity é

But that's where we hit a hiccup in 'Tavi!

If you enter é 'Tavi displays it exactly as you typed it.

There are two possible solutions:

1. 'Tavi should spot that it's an html entity, and pass it through unchanged. (If a user actually wanted to display &eacute, she would enter é).

2. 'Tavi should spot the character code that corresponds to an entity, and output as an html entity. This is much more Wiki-like behaviour (i.e. you just type, and it works). However, as already explained, %E9 -> é on a PC, but Î on a Mac.

Interestingly, if you enter a name in preferences using an entity, Tavi correctly says "Your user name is ..." when editing a page, but incorrectly shows the username in the document, which means I now have three homepages:

http://tavi.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Sean+D.+Soll%26amp%3Beacute%3B

http://tavi.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Sean+D.+Soll%26amp%3Beacute%3B

An alternative is to use utf-8 encoding for your web pages. If you do that I suspect %E9 will always display as an e acute. Given that Netscape4 and other buggy browsers are fast approaching obsolescence, it may be about time to change 'Tavi's default content charset from "ISO-8859-1" back to "utf-8". -- ScottMoonen