Re: Is there pi?

This is really off-topic for this list, but it seems some issues should
be clarified ...

crism@exemplary.net (Christopher R. Maden) wrote:

> 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.

Right.

> 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;

To clarify: numeric character references should work regardless of
character encoding.  π SHALL be interpreted as "GREEK SMALL
LETTER PI" even if the document is encoded in US-ASCII (or whatever).
Indeed there are some user agents which incorrectly treat NCRs
differently depending on character encoding, but please note that
such behavior is non-conforming.

> and π will only work in
> post-XML browsers (the convention originated in XML, and was adopted into
> SGML and thence to HTML).

Some pre-XML browsers support hexadecimal numeric character references,
sush as Alis Technologies' Tango browser.  Tango does display π
as "GREEK SMALL LETTER PI".

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 09:05:21 UTC