About "polish letters" on WWW pages

As ISO 8859-2 standard becomes popular, I decided to introduce polish national characters to my homepages. However, I decided to make them available only in this one standard, and not to make them available in Windows' standard.

Why this way? ISO 8859-2 is an international standard created by international standard organization - ISO. It's a standard in the Internet, is set up as a Polish Norm, and is supported by Polish Internet Society.

Fonts compatible with ISO 8859-2 standard are available on most platforms (X Windows, MS Windows, DOS, Linux text console, and probably many more), and even if we don't have them, we can use browser charset translation feature (the number of browsers able to do this is growing - eg. Netscape 3.0 automatically adapts itself to the document). Read here about methods of making your browser ISO 8859-2 compatible.

Because currently not all browsers can translate ISO 8859-2, I also made a version with no polish characters available. Default version is ISO 8859-2, because most browsers can utilize it, and if you wish to get documents without "polish letters" you can easily configure the browser, so it will request that version from the server.

If you're interested in technical aspects of polish characters support on the server's side, you may find some useful tips here.