Responses to "Another Html Question"

[Thomas Dowling]

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> From: Maxine Marks Feinberg <maxif at li.net>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Responses to "Another Html Question"
> Date: Saturday, May 31, 1997 6:50 PM
> 
> Many thanks to all of you who took the time to help me out.
> I am no longer climbing the walls.  I thank you.  The walls thank 
> you.
> 
> BTW, special thanks to Craig Booher for pointing out that I could 
> also use the ISO character set coding for superscripts 1, 2 and 3 
> (namely, &#185; &#178;  and &#179, respectively).
> 
> Now, the question is:  other than for situations involving numbers 
> higher than 3, when would one use character set coding vs html 
> coding?  I have learned that the character set coding apparently 
> doesn't work too well in Mac browsers, but I also don't know how well 
> the <sup></sup> does in comparison.

The Mac's native character set does not comply with the ISO Latin 1 set;
Mac browsers are theoretically obligated to remap numeric entities to the
correct character in the Mac set, but often don't.  (The only browser I can
get to run on our Mac is MSIE, for some odd reason, and it remaps
characters to the Windows character set.)  If you have a large percentage
of Mac browsers hitting your site and are willing to support broken browser
behavior, this might discourage you from using numeric entities that are
known to display incorrectly.

Personally,  I would also go with the <SUP>...</SUP> (or
<SUP><SMALL>...</SMALL></SUP>) construction, but would do so because I find
it easier to edit, it isn't limited to a small number of superscript
characters, and gives actual 1's, 2's, and 3's to search engines and
browser Find commands.

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu