Help with font symbols

Brian <usenet3 (AT) julietremblay (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

More plausible then you might imagine. I've worked in not a few offices
where only MSIE/Win was available.

Then again, I had no more right to configure my system then I had to
install functioning software. So the point still stands. :-)

I worked at a company like that a while ago. Every time I logged in, my
controlled-by-corporate-IT profile was updated to the current officially
blessed profile. And that included browser configuration settings.

There were still ways for sufficiently motivated power users to configure
their desktop environment, but it was a non-trivial exercize.
--
Darin McGrew, mcgrew (AT) stanfordalumni (DOT) org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, darin (AT) htmlhelp (DOT) com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"Men build too many walls and not enough bridges." - Sir Isaac Newton

Arne <arne.luras (AT) telia (DOT) com> wrote:

I would use the entity &Prime;
But since the meter system is what we use, I print out "inch" on those
occasions I have to. :-)

Originally, entities were introduced into SGML with the idea that
constructs like &Prime; could have different definitions in different
situations, resulting in different renderings. For example, a primitive
system could use the Ascii quotation mark, an advanced one could use the
double prime character, and a name (in a suitable language) could be used
too.

HTML took just the idea of entities as "named character references" and
gave them fixed meanings.

To make things worse, there's no way to refer to entities (or character
references) in CSS. They basically don't exist in CSS, since CSS "sees"
just the parsed characters.

This means that to get variation in rendering, according to browsing
situations, we would need clumsy constructs like
<span class="Prime">&Prime;</span>
with CSS code like
.Prime { content: " inches"; }
or, as the case may be,
.Prime { content: "\22 "; }
And this approach is currently supported by minority browsers only.
(Of course, the use of &Prime; vs. ″ vs. the double prime as a
charcter is irrelevant here.)
(In fact it might be better to use <span class="Prime">"</span>, since
this would work very robustly in non-CSS situations.)

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