Dear to chemists hearts: Greek characters on the Web
I am posting this because I see "FAQs" on this topic widely, and I dont know many of the answers myself! Its the issue of greek characters, much used in chemistry! Over the last 10 years, it seems many mechanisms have been used to display them in browsers. Many of these mechanisms had short lifetimes! The current recommended way, if using the standard (7-bit) ASCII text character set, is to define an entity. thus β or Β (its case sensitive). Older deprecated methods ( <font face="symbol">b</font> ), along with CSS equivalents, by and large no longer work. The "future way" is to use utf encoding. Here is where confusion can start. Thus http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/greek.html contains (according to my unicode compliant text editor, bbedit 8) a utf-8 encoded beta. One has to tell the browser that the default encoding is indeed Unicode utf-8, but in my hands at least, this does not result in display of a beta. Is there anyone out there who can explain it all to us? -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs@mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
No explanations, but there is another issue as well. Many sites are using mysql and php to run web sites - but there are problems, currently, in both with unicode. See http://www.istitutocolli.org/uniwakka/MultiLanguageIssues to see UniWakka's perspective. UniWakka through the efforts of Andrea Rossato, incidentally, is trying really hard, and succeeding, to be useful for chemistry. See http://www.istitutocolli.org/uniwakka/JmolAction http://www.istitutocolli.org/uniwakka/ChemistrySupport http://www.istitutocolli.org/uniwakka/ChemistrySupportCml http://www.istitutocolli.org/uniwakka/DocsActionJmol and other pages on that site, although my experience over the last year or more with wikis is that chemists just do not appreciate their significance and power. Regards On 31 Oct 2004, at 08:45, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
I am posting this because I see "FAQs" on this topic widely, and I dont know many of the answers myself!
Its the issue of greek characters, much used in chemistry! Over the last 10 years, it seems many mechanisms have been used to display them in browsers. Many of these mechanisms had short lifetimes!
The current recommended way, if using the standard (7-bit) ASCII text character set, is to define an entity. thus β or Β (its case sensitive). Older deprecated methods ( <font face="symbol">b</font> ), along with CSS equivalents, by and large no longer work.
The "future way" is to use utf encoding. Here is where confusion can start.
Thus http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/greek.html
contains (according to my unicode compliant text editor, bbedit 8) a utf-8 encoded beta. One has to tell the browser that the default encoding is indeed Unicode utf-8, but in my hands at least, this does not result in display of a beta.
Is there anyone out there who can explain it all to us? --
Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs@mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
_______________________________________________ chemweb mailing list chemweb@imperial.ac.uk http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
-- Dr Mark J Winter Department of Chemistry, The University, Sheffield S3 7HF, England tel: +44 (0)114 222 9304 fax: +44 (0)114 222 9303 e-m: mark.winter@sheffield.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/mjw/mark-winter.html WebElements is the periodic table on the world-wide web: http://www.webelements.com/ The Sheffield Chemdex is a listing of chemistry sites on the world-wide web: http://www.chemdex.org/
participants (2)
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Mark Winter
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Rzepa, Henry