Re: HTML, ASCII, and Homesite

[Scott McClare <smcclare -at- DY4 -dot- COM>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Crystol Wigemyr [SMTP:Crystol -dot- Wigemyr -at- KENONIC -dot- COM]
> Sent: Monday, January 04, 1999 4:16 PM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      HTML, ASCII, and Homesite
>
>I discovered that my eval copy of Homesite 4.0 was automatically
>changing some of my tags based on an option that, by default,
>was "on".

[snip]

>I have a few questions:
>
>What is an "entity" ??

It's a special code substituted for a character that can't be entered in the
HTML literally(for example, metacharacters that are part of HTML code
itself) or which are difficult to enter from the keyboard (such as accented
characters).

Entities have the syntax &xxx; where & and ; delimit the entity, and xxx is
the entity name.

>Why would this option be "on" by default? What advantages are there
>to using "entities" vs. ASCII code?

A few come to mind easily.

1.  How do you enter the "<" and ">" symbols, since all HTML browsers will
interpret them as tag delimiters?  Use the correct entities: &gt; for > and
&lt; for <.  Similarly, you can't enter the ampersand directly, since it's
part of the entity description; so you use &amp; instead.  Entities let you
escape metacharacters as literals.

2.  Similarly, a few characters have different meaning in different
contexts.  Quotation marks can be entered literally within the text of your
Web pages, but if you want to put quotes in your title or ALT tags, you have
to escape them with the &quot; entity.

3.  Entities make easy mnemonics for difficult characters.  When I was
studying French in university, I had many of the ASCII codes for accented
characters memorized, and the rest taped to my wall near my computer.  It's
much easier to remember that the E acute is &eacute; rather than ASCII
character 130, &copy; is the copyright symbol, and so on.

4.  Some helpful characters can't be entered any other way, simply because
they're not part of the ASCII standard.  You would use &nbsp; to create a
non-breaking space, for example.

4.  Different computer platforms and operating systems map high-ASCII
characters differently.  Just because an em dash is 151 on a Windows machine
doesn't mean it's 151 everywhere else.  Using an entity name rather than a
number lets a browser interpret a character for its particular platform.

>Several PCs display "$mdash;" instead of the actual em dash.
>Anyone know why? I think those PCs are using IE 3 and I'm
>using the latest version of IE 4. Is this display problem an
>IE 3 thing?

It's an IE3 thing.  Simply put, IE3 is too old to recognize the &mdash;
entity, so it renders it as a literal.  (Lots of browsers do this; it's a
pity developers don't make them simply ignore unknown entities, the way they
do unknown tags.  Then again, it might carry valuable information and the
reader might understand it anyway.)

The &mdash; and dozens of other entities came into being very recently, and
generally browser recognition of them is very poor.

>How am I supposed to make pages
>that are multiple-browser-friendly when I can't even get a
>consistent display in a company where everyone has the
>same browser (albeit different versions)???

If you can find other ways of expressing the same symbols, do it.  You can
always express an em dash with two hyphens, for example.

Generally speaking, go for the lowest common denominator.  If you know a lot
of people in your company are using IE3, write your HTML according to a
standard that IE3 supports.  That way, your code will look the same to
everyone using it or a later version of the browser.

>I'm enjoying this foray into the world of html, but at times I
>do get frustrated.

When I was first learning HTML, I found the on-line guides at
http://www.htmlhelp.com/ extremely helpful at explaining these sorts of
things.  Also, you can download their HTML references as WinHelp or HTML
files and use them on your own PC.

For example, if you used the reference for HTML 3.2 and coded all your Web
pages to comply with that version of the HTML standard, you should have no
problems with incompatibilities between IE3 and 4.

Take care,

Scott

--
Scott McClare - Technical Writer
DY 4 Systems Inc., Kanata, Ontario, Canada
(613) 599-9199 x502 smcclare -at- dy4 -dot- com
Opinions are my own


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