Re: special chars: male and female sign

In a message dated 10/04/2003 15:17:33 GMT Daylight Time, 
marco_bleeker@hetnet.nl writes:


> Hello, I am a biologist and on the internet since 1994. Now, after all this 
> time, I am surprised that the special characters for "male" and "female" 
> still don't work. You know, "male" is a circle with an arrow pointing out 
> to the top right (same as the sign for the planet Mars) and "female" is a 
> circle with a cross underneith (same as the sign for the planet Venus). 
> While at it: for bisexual beings (such as most flowering plants) it would 
> be nice to also have the combined sign.
> 
> I have noticed that there is a whole list of mathematical signs that now 
> work in HTML, implemented in Unicode. I have also found that the two signs 
> I am looking for listen to Unicode 2640 and 2642. But they don't work in 
> html... or at least not in MSIE 5.5 under Win98SE. Would other or newer 
> browsers do better? I think there is a real need for this, and when it can 
> be done for mathematics - please help biology too!
> 
> Thanks, Marco

Marco,

Try this code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>The male sign: &#x2642;</p>
<p>The female sign: &#x2640;</p>
</body>
</html>

It displays both signs correctly in IE5.5 under Win2K for me.

Andrew Watt

Received on Thursday, 10 April 2003 10:34:41 UTC