|
Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
|
|
|
Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2005-02-11 22:09:54
Subject: Re: 
> For my own curiosity I took a page, added minimal HTML tags to
> display it and found that didn't convert for
> display. Is it a valid tag?
It's not valid in HTML, no. If you want to encode this character in valid HTML, you could use its Unicode value and encode it as ǽ. Since a lot of browsers don't yet display that character correctly, it's displayed here as a little image file embedded in the text: . The web software I wrote converts the abstract entity in the base documents to the HTML code to embed the image, for display purposes.
In XML and SGML, it's perfectly legitimate to define your own entities. I've used standard ones where they exist in HTML, but when there is no standard named entity for a certain character, I've created new entities following a set of principles (see "Character Encoding Standards" under the "About" tab).
An entity can be thought of as a convenient alias for a particular Unicode character. The character table lists the Unicode equivalent for each entity, except for the two or three characters which exist in our texts but are apparently not defined in Unicode, such as the archaic Icelandic ao ligature and the Old English thorn-bar character.
In the long run, I plan to switch all of the base documents to pure Unicode with no entities at all. I've been waiting for a long time for Unicode to be well enough supported for this to be a practical option; it's gradually getting there.
--Sean
| Messages in this thread | Name | College/University | Date |
| æ-acute; |
Gene Brunner |
Penn State (retired) |
2005-02-11 10:34:09 |
| Re: æ-acute; |
Sean Crist |
Swarthmore College |
2005-02-11 22:09:54 |