Re: Is there pi?

[Joyce Taylor]
>Hi have a question, please.  Am doing a page and it uses the Greek letter
>for pi.  Is there some ascii code that can make the actual pi symbol?  Thanx
>in advance!

This question really doesn't involve accessibility, and is more appropriate
to www-html@w3.org or comp.infosystems.www.html.authoring.

There is no ASCII code for pi - ASCII is a 7-bit character set including
unaccented Latin letters, numbers, and some punctuation and control
characters.

The character set for HTML is Unicode, which does include pi.  However,
older browsers don't implement Unicode, and newer ones don't always do it
well.

You can try π or π (not &960; as someone suggested) or π.
The entity π is defined in HTML 4.0; 3C0 hexadecimal (960 decimal) is
the "code point" of the lower-case Greek letter pi in the Unicode character
set.  However, π will only work in HTML 4.0 browsers; π will only
work in some browsers if the document character encoding is defined as
UTF-8 or another full Unicode encoding; and π will only work in
post-XML browsers (the convention originated in XML, and was adopted into
SGML and thence to HTML).

The only reliable way I found to do non-Latin-1 characters for the O'Reilly
CDs was to use a small graphic (with appropriate alt text of course -
"[pi]" in this case).

-Chris

--
Christopher R. Maden, Solutions Architect
Exemplary Technologies
One Embarcadero Center, Ste. 2405
San Francisco, CA 94111

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 03:27:45 UTC