On Mon, 17 Jun 1996, Paul Deards wrote:
Does anyone know a way of getting a radical dot symbol into HTML - at the moment I'm stuck with using the degree symbol (ie °). I'm also having problems with equation arrows, is ---> really the best HTML can cope with?
I guess this just shows how non-ideal the current version of HTML is for scientists (I know HTML3 is better, but many browsers still aren't compatible). Ironic, really, given the Web's origins!
It's important to distinguish between whether an HTML file can *carry* the information and whether that information can be satisfactorily *rendered* on any or all browsers. HTML is an application of SGML and SGML defines a method of carrying characters (or strings) using 'general entities' - these are the &foo; that you see. The definitions of the entities are given in a document called the DTD which defines the syntax of the language. If you look in that (downloadable from W3) and if you can understand SGML DTDs :-( you will find that the entities are defined using the ISO-Latin-1 set (in HTML2.0). In principle entities can be defined relating to other character sets including Unicode. (You may also define other entities yourself at the head of your HTML file if you know SGML syntax, though I doubt there are many browsers which can comply with this.) In SGML (e.g. in CML) it is possible to define any entities you wish - certainly all the ISO ones. This is frequenly done in publishing applications. Sometimes these can be rendered into laTeX; in other cases it depends on the power of the postprocessing software. P.
Peter Murray-Rust, Glaxo Research & Dev. (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk); (BioMOO: PeterMR) Birkbeck College, ubcg09q@cryst.bbk.ac.uk, CBMT/Daresbury mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/HOME.html ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)