RE: HTML Code for "Greater Than or Equals to" Symbol

["Ridder, Fred" <Fred -dot- Ridder -at- Dialogic -dot- com>]

What you describe are the text versions of the HTML character 
entities for "less than" and "greater than".  These entities are 
sort of official, in the sense that they are part of the HTML standard
but they are *not* supported by all browsers.  What are more 
universally supported by browsers are the numerical versions 
of these entities, which are < for the "less than" character 
and &#62 for the "greater than" character.  

But you should note that what Leslie Grimm originally asked 
for was the "greater than or equal" symbol, which is *not* part 
of the 8859-1 character set.  For that matter, it's not part of
the Windows character set in any text font.  In Windows, you
have to resort to a symbol font to get the "greater or equal"
character (character #0179 in the Symbol font) or the "less 
than or equal" character (character #0163 in the Symbol font).
Note that these Windows character numbers map to a 
superscript 3 and the Pound Sterling symbol in most text fonts.

Fred Ridder
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic, an Intel Company
Parsippany, NJ


-----Original Message-----
From: Steven J. Owens [mailto:puff -at- netcom -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 6:42 PM
To: Fred -dot- Ridder -at- Dialogic -dot- com
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com; leslieg -at- aiinet -dot- com
Subject: Re: HTML Code for "Greater Than or Equals to" Symbol


Ridder, Fred writes:
> On Mon, 20 Dec 1999 10:28:20 -0500 Leslie Grimm asked
> >I apologize if this is a little off topic ...
> >Does anyone know if there is an HTML code for the "greater than or equals
> >to" symbol?  If there is one, I have not been able to find it.
> 
> A very useful resource with a wealth of information on all things HTML 
> is the Web Design Group (WDG) website.  Among other things, this site
> provides a chart (in several forms) of the ISO 8859-1 character set that 
> is specified in the HTML standard. Check out this character set for 
>     http:\\www.htmlhelp.com\reference\charset
> According to the charts and other information on this website, there is 
> no entity in this official character set for the greater-than-or-equal-to
> symbol.

     Hm, I don't know offhand if it's "official" or not, but there are two
tags to do this:

          less than (<) is "&lt;"
          greater than (>) is "&gt;"

     The semi-colon is part of the tag.  The quotes aren't.  These
tags are kinda necessary, since otherwise it's impossible to put
examples of HTML tags in a web page.  Since some of the earliest web
pages were on how to write web pages, I suspect they ran into this
issue quite early on :-).

Steven J. Owens
puff -at- netcom -dot- com