Re: math symbols etc in HTML +- compatibility

[Charles Bell <charbell@BELLSOUTH.NET>]

The latest version of the html specification can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/

The full list of all the character entities is at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html

which covers just about every symbol you can think of.

an entity is an html string such as >
It starts with the ampersand and ends with a semicolon.


<!ENTITY alpha    CDATA "&#945;" -- greek small letter alpha, U+03B1
ISOgrk3 -->

can represented as &alpha; or &#945;

when parsed by the web browser, entities are replaced by the character in
this example a utf-16 \u03b1

ISO 8859-1 is a common character encoding



At 02:16 PM 11/22/2003, you wrote:
> Hi --
>
> Many of us write HTML documents with math and other
> fancy symbols in them.
>
> We want this to look nice on "all" browsers (or
> at least as many browsers as possible) which is
> not entirely trivial.  There are a lot of tricks
> that work OK on one platform but are not portable.
>
> There are various pieces to this puzzle, including
>   -- eight-bit character encodings
>   -- unicode
>   -- HTML entity encodings of various types
>   -- Symbol-font kludges
>   -- et cetera
>
> Some of this was not at all easy to figure out,
> although the end-point makes a certain amount of
> sense.  For the sort of things people on this list
> do, I basically recommend using decimal HTML entity
> codes for anything that's not 7-bit ascii ... plus
> a couple of kludgey exceptions to provide MSIE
> compatibility.
>
> For details see
>    http://www.av8n.com/physics/encoding.htm