Character entities

Posted on July 03, 2003 @ 10:09 in General

When writing for the web, you can use SGML Character Entities to display typographic symbols and characters with diacritical marks in your text. The format these character entities take, is: ampersand+CDATA+semicolon. So for the copyright sign you'd type © which shows up as ©. The euro sign for example is: €, €, etc. It's not ideal, because you still have to remember some codes and you don't get to just punch a key on the keyboard, but at least you can get your stuff to display. (Don't forget to set your character encoding to ISO 8859-1 and while you're at it, check your doctype.)

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  1. And, of course, there's the nerdish way I prefer to code most of 'em, being ampersand+hash+decimal-unicode-number+semicolon ;^P (such as ſ for the small Roman long s ſ), since a lot of the extended Latin alphabet has yet to receive CDATA mnemonics.

    DOCTYPES I hate, because when I include them, the browser-that-cannot-be-named will not show my pages the way I want them to appear. Of course I know I should use them and work in the sweat of my brow until I coerce said browser into cooperation, but I'm essentially a lazy sod and not well motivated to change what amounts to little more than my private pages to accomodate 5% of the possible viewers. But in theory, DOCTYPES are essential (I don't work for an XML IT department for nowt, of course!)

    Posted by Arjan on July 03, 2003 @ 12:36

  2. I only do entities that have CDATA mnemonics. My brain is wired for words, even somewhat silly acronyms, not for numbers.

    As for doctypes... the only one that really interests me is XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I'm not doing XML, I simply want the best (X)HTML+CSS experience that _I_ can create and that it does let me do, across all relevant browsers, even the Browser That Must Not Be Named.

    I suppose what we really need is a browser called Rettop Yrrah to expunge the evil that has cast such a dark shadow over the web.

    Posted by Frank on July 03, 2003 @ 15:19

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