[thelist] ASCii: html name vs html number

Ken Chase raskenbo at fastmail.fm
Wed Nov 5 10:43:54 CST 2003


On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 07:44:59 -0500, "Brian Cummiskey"
<brian at hondaswap.com> said:
> I'm using an XHTML strict utf-8 charset, and I am wanting to use the ">>"
> character.
> 
> According to a chart i found, &raquo; does the same thing as #&187 - one
> is the html
> name, one is the html number.
> 
> which is more widely supported?  Moreover, which is the more correct
> version to use,
> given my charset? Any limitations to either?
> 
> Thanks

Several of the named entities (for example &endash;) are not supported by
Netscape 4 and possibly other browsers. I have yet to see a character
reference (for example #&187) not appear correctly in a browser. Please
note that I have not done extensive reserach on this topic.

One way of testing this is to view the chosen character on the following
site using a variety of browsers. 

"The following table lists all known HTML entity names along with their
ASCII / ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character names and codes, if any."

<http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html>

kenbo


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