[thelist] HTML chars vs. Symbol font etc.

[Palyne Gaenir]

Hi Rudy, thanks for the response.

> you mentioned that the site you inherited had a lot of "symbol
> font" so the standard protocol on the web would be to choose a
> standard character set like iso-8859-1 and then use only code
> points from that set, or better yet, only standard entities --
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html 

I followed your link.  

> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html#iso-88591

Your "standard entities" page IS the ISO 8859-1 set.  There are two 
different ways to make the special characters in the seemingly "old" 
(HTML 2 compliant) code....

It suggests putting the following at the top of the file:
<!ENTITY % HTMLsymbol PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbols//EN//HTML" >
which I did.

The code "types" are recognizeable in the different formats:
one is:
                 &ne;
for the 'not equal' symbol...
the other is:
                   &#8800; 
for the 'not equal' symbol.

IE 5.5 has no problem seeing either of them.  Not sure about previous 
versions of IE.

NS 4.7 sees the first as the raw code and the second as a question 
mark.  Neither work.

Obviously this will not work for me -- stats on two dozen sites tell 
me these browser versions are the majority of what is being used.

I know Netscape sucks (alas, the fall of a previously good thing).  
But I really don't want to have tell everybody that they can't take a 
statistics course online unless they can use IE.  And if I put it in 
symbol font, all kinds of systems that don't have that font don't see 
it correctly (and as you mentioned, asking people to download a font 
set OR a new browser is sure to drive many off).

There isn't any kind of "old" special character code (which might not 
be on that page) that Netscape users previous to version 6 can 
actually SEE?

Best regards,
Palyne