Comments on element data table

http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html,
represents information on a chemical element.
(http://www.physci.org/test/chem/ for the CSS's)

Not yet coded for links to other forms of
the element. Suggestions for layout welcome.

NN 4.8 displays lambda, kappa and rho as '?'.
Is there any way of getting the greek letters
to appear for NN 4.8?

Do the superscripts, and subscripts work 'ok'
on your browser?
Why is it that I have set the table cell width's
using em, but the text inside does not scale
at the same rate (text size smallest - large space,
text size largest - little space)?

General comments welcome.

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Andrew Thompson wrote:

http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html,
[...]
NN 4.8 displays lambda, kappa and rho as '?'.
Is there any way of getting the greek letters
to appear for NN 4.8?

Yes, http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...cklist.html#s6

Read that in conjunction with note [C] :
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...t.html#NoteUTF

By the way, it's preferable to send the charset attribute on the real
HTTP content-type header from the server. "meta http-equiv" is no
more than an ersatz in the HTTP context.

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell (AT) ph (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Andrew Thompson wrote:

http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html,
[...]
NN 4.8 displays lambda, kappa and rho as '?'.
Is there any way of getting the greek letters
to appear for NN 4.8?

Yes, http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...cklist.html#s6

Read that in conjunction with note [C] :
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...t.html#NoteUTF

Thanks Alan. A change from ISO-8859 to UTF-8
has the greek letters displaying in NN 4.8
(old version http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element01.html,
latest version http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html)

By the way, it's preferable to send the charset attribute on the real
HTTP content-type header from the server. "meta http-equiv" is no
more than an ersatz in the HTTP context.

....errrmm. I'm gonna need to do more research before
I even understand that. (I understand it only to the extent
that the line mentioned is telling the browser what content
to expect)

Wait. Are you saying the line with "meta http-equiv"
is not necessary so long as the server is organised to
send the correct header?

I have also been developing JSP's and explicitly including
the "meta http-equiv" line, despite assurances the JSP
server and browser 'negotiate' a content type (I think
that was the term).

What I really need is a tutorial on these 'headers',
or at least information in some detail on them.

I'll hunt round W3C site later for such, can anyone
suggest a good link for same?

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Andrew Thompson wrote:

By the way, it's preferable to send the charset attribute on the real
HTTP content-type header from the server. "meta http-equiv" is no
more than an ersatz in the HTTP context.

[..]

Wait. Are you saying the line with "meta http-equiv"
is not necessary so long as the server is organised to
send the correct header?

That's one of the points, yes. Your server is sending
HTTP content-type of text/html just fine, but there's no charset
attribute on it.

I have also been developing JSP's and explicitly including
the "meta http-equiv" line, despite assurances the JSP
server and browser 'negotiate' a content type (I think
that was the term).

Look, by the time that meta http-equiv is being processed, the actual
content-type (of the HTML document) has long since been determined.
The issue here is the "charset=" attribute, which defines the
character encoding that's applicable.

I don't know quite what you're saying in the paragraph above, but
I'm pretty sure it's not what we need to discuss here.[1]

What I really need is a tutorial on these 'headers',
or at least information in some detail on them.

http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html

I've got an old-ish page that addresses some aspects of this, at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...t/ns-burp.html

It really needs reworking and retitling, to put the architectural and
potential security issues more at the forefront, and the NN4 "burp" as
just an inconvenience in an obsolete browser.

cheers

[1] Your external javascript documents ought to be sent out from the
server with an appropriate content-type (and charset=) on the HTTP
transaction. Javascript is not HTML, and a "meta charset" wouldn't
mean anything in particular in a Javascript document; if you're
thinking in terms of the HTML page which calls-out the external JS,
then a "meta http-equiv" in that relates to the HTML page itself, not
to any external JS pages which it calls. Does that help at all?

"Andrew Thompson" <andrew64 (AT) bigNOSPAMpond (DOT) com> wrote:

http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html,
represents information on a chemical element.
(http://www.physci.org/test/chem/ for the CSS's)

It seems that many of your questions that have been addressed here are not
really about CSS but about other aspects of Web authoring. Actually my
comments also fall into a more general category, mostly.

First, are you familiar with the material at http://www.webelements.com/
which contains a huge amount of information about elements, including their
chemical properties? What I mean is that would hardly be meaningful to
duplicate that work - rather, you could assume it as a basic background
material and consider on things not covered there.

Do the superscripts, and subscripts work 'ok'
on your browser?

It depends on the browser. I think the implementation of subscripts
and superscripts varies quite a lot by browser, and many of the
implementations are not very good. I would actually suggest setting both
font-size and vertical-align for them, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/#subsup
On your page, they look a bit odd, maybe mainly because IE doesn't implement
them very well for a monospace font. Incidentally, why do you use monospace
font? I think the numbers would look better in some normal font.

I would also suggest using
- the middle dot character (&middot instead of a space in multiplication
of SI units
- the multiplication sign (&times for multiplication of quantities,
instead of the letter x
- the degree symbol (&deg instead of the letter o in superscript style
- italics for symbols of quantities, as normal in physics - and probably
using <i> markup in HTML rather than <span> and CSS, especially since such
use of italics is essential and not just presentational.

Why is it that I have set the table cell width's
using em, but the text inside does not scale
at the same rate (text size smallest - large space,
text size largest - little space)?

Sorry, I don't really understand the question. When I change the basic font
size on IE, the cell widths change too, as expected. But is there any reason
to set the cell widths at all?

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell (AT) ph (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Andrew Thompson wrote:
....
I don't know quite what you're saying in the paragraph above, but
I'm pretty sure it's not what we need to discuss here.[1]

What I really need is a tutorial on these 'headers',
or at least information in some detail on them.

http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html

Thank you for your detailed reply Alan, your comments
have made me realise I better go off and study the links you
provided prior to wasting the bandwidth and time of the
folks here.

I'll get back to y'all if I have further quesions based
on what I read.

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote

"Andrew Thompson" <andrew64 (AT) bigNOSPAMpond (DOT) com> wrote:

http://www.physci.org/test/chem/element.html,
represents information on a chemical element.
(http://www.physci.org/test/chem/ for the CSS's)

It seems that many of your questions that have been addressed here are not
really about CSS but about other aspects of Web authoring. Actually my
comments also fall into a more general category, mostly.

First, are you familiar with the material at http://www.webelements.com/
....What I mean is that would hardly be meaningful to
duplicate that work - rather, you could assume it as a basic background
material and consider on things not covered there.

The short answer to your question is 'no', I was not aware
of this existing site (which has some very nice touches to it)

Irregardless of whether the data is a replication,
I will be completing the site, as one of my aims
is to get lots of eyes checking the information
(which I will be reading directly out of my own
software) in hopes of correcting any typo's.

My site will offer rotatable 3D models displaying
the electron shells and structures of compounds,
and also the ability to search, filter and sort the
data of the table and produce graphs and images
of same, an 'acronym buster'..

Most of this functionality will be developed for
use in data analysis generally.

[ Ultimately - all justification aside, I am doing
this simply because 'I have the technology'..
There, I said it! ]

Do the superscripts, and subscripts work 'ok'
on your browser?

It depends on the browser. I think the implementation of subscripts
and superscripts varies quite a lot by browser, and many of the
implementations are not very good. I would actually suggest setting both
font-size and vertical-align for them, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/#subsup
On your page, they look a bit odd, maybe mainly because IE doesn't
implement
them very well for a monospace font.

I'll look into that further and probably adopt the
suggestions therein.

Incidentally, why do you use monospace
font? I think the numbers would look better in some normal font.

Originally I wanted long lists of numbers to
line up the way you see numbers lined up
in accounting documents, and felt I should
be consistent in this table.

The more I think about it (especially using
floats and exponents) the less sense it makes.

I would also suggest using
- the middle dot character (&middot instead of a space in multiplication
of SI units
- the multiplication sign (&times for multiplication of quantities,
instead of the letter x
- the degree symbol (&deg instead of the letter o in superscript style
- italics for symbols of quantities, as normal in physics - and probably
using <i> markup in HTML rather than <span> and CSS, especially since such
use of italics is essential and not just presentational.

All good suggestions, done.

Why is it that I have set the table cell width's
using em, but the text inside does not scale
at the same rate (text size smallest - large space,
text size largest - little space)?

Sorry, I don't really understand the question. When I change the basic
font
size on IE, the cell widths change too, as expected.

I meant that when you set font size to 'smallest'
the space in the cell is about 50%, by the time
you have gone to 'largest' the text fills 90% of
the width of the cell.

What I expected using 'em' measurements for
both the cell widths and text inside, was that the
amount of cell space remain constant from smallest
through largest font size..

..But is there any reason
to set the cell widths at all?

Wanted to create a consistent look between tables
on different pages.
Again, reconsidering. OK - they are gone.
Let the browser determine the cell widths.

Changes uploaded.

Thanks for your suggestions Yucca*

* btw - Do you prefer to be addressed by others
in written form as Yucca or Jukka?

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

"Andrew Thompson" <andrew64 (AT) bigNOSPAMpond (DOT) com> wrote:

I would also suggest using
- the middle dot character (&middot instead of a space in
multiplication of SI units
- -
All good suggestions, done.

There seems to be an odd problem with &middot; that I hadn't noticed: on
my IE 6 (Win 98), the middle dots appear as rectangular boxes, indicating
lack of available glyphs in the font. It seems that this is triggered by
font-family: sans-serif which is of course perfectly correct - but not
handled properly by IE. I think IE uses its default sans-serif font, which
cannot be changed from browser preferences, and this font apparently lacks
the glyph for the middle dot. This is rather nasty, but the workaround is
to list a few particular fonts before (or even instead of) sans-serif,
e.g. td { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }
Generally, generic fonts are poorly implemented in IE, which makes them
far less useful than they could be.

But maybe it's just my computer? Maybe its font file is somehow damaged.
Other ISO-8859-1 characters look OK even when I specify font-family:
sans-serif.

What I expected using 'em' measurements for
both the cell widths and text inside, was that the
amount of cell space remain constant from smallest
through largest font size..

I see... but since em is the _height_ of a font and since the widths of
characters may vary, the proportions may change.

* btw - Do you prefer to be addressed by others
in written form as Yucca or Jukka?

Doesn't matter. "Jukka" is the real spelling, "Yucca" is nickname-like.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote

.....

I would also suggest using
- the middle dot character (&middot instead of a space in
multiplication of SI units
....
There seems to be an odd problem with &middot; that I hadn't noticed: on
my IE 6 (Win 98), the middle dots appear as rectangular boxes,

I now have..
body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } [ in ptoe.css ]
td { font-family: inherit; } [ in element.css ]
...is that any better?

What I expected using 'em' measurements for
both the cell widths and text inside, was that the
amount of cell space remain constant from smallest
through largest font size..

I see... but since em is the _height_ of a font and since the widths of
characters may vary, the proportions may change.

Duh! Tah.

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

"Andrew Thompson" <andrew64 (AT) bigNOSPAMpond (DOT) com> wrote:

I now have..
body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } [ in ptoe.css ]
td { font-family: inherit; } [ in element.css ]
..is that any better?

Yes. But the value inherit is not well supported. In principle the
declaration is not needed at all, since font-family is automatically
inherited by a td element when not set at all for any element but body. In
practice inheritance into tables is buggy. It's probably safest to set

body, th, td { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/