Hubert Feyrer and Jan Schaumann wrote:

HF> About Umlaute etc., I don't have a problem to use ISO 8859-1 (=E4, =
=F6,
HF> =FC) instead, but that's my personal opinion.

JS> In HTML they SHOULD be replaced with entities (or even MUST?) to co=
mply
JS> with w3's validator, IIRC.  Also, I, for example, don't have those =
keys
JS> on my keyboard ;-)

No.

You may use an encoding of your choice, provided the encoding is
correctly labeled.  See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html
for HTML 4.01 (in particular, section 5.2.1).

For some encodings, character entity references (that's the thingies yo=
u
seem to refer to (ä and the like)) have been defined for your
convenience, and you _may_ use these.  Conforming clients are required
to convert these to the apropriate character entities.

(See also http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html, section 2.4.1)=


RFC 2854 does not contradict that.

Rainer J. H. Brandt

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