Re: Dynamic Font Size

[Alan G. Isaac]
> I'm looking at
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html
> 
> Why is it   and   but   — and – ?

Good question.  Unfortunately, it's not really subject to debate;
those entity names are from the ISO standard entity sets.  Some of the
names are twisted because they were subject to a six-character name
restriction (not for any really good reason), but I've never really
been clear on why mdash and ndash are named that way.

> Why are  — and – equivalent to — and –
> instead of — and ˜ ?

Because they should work on operating systems that don't come from
Redmond.

> Why are no character entity references below   listed on this
> page?

Same reason.  The 8-bit ISO character sets (ISO 8859-*, 8859-1 is
western European) reserve 129-159 as control characters.  Windows uses
different character sets (CP 12*, CP 1252 for western European).
Since it doesn't need the upper control characters, it uses that range
for characters missing from the corresponding ISO sets, like oe
ligatures, en and em dashes, ellipses, and s and z caron.

A numeric character reference (&#...;) is a reference to the document
character set, not the encoding; in HTML 4, the document character set
is Unicode (regardless of what bytes are actually used to store and
transmit the characters).  Unicode has a control character at code
point 151, but an em dash at code point 8212.

-Chris
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Received on Friday, 26 March 1999 15:10:43 UTC