There is a very full description of
HTML symbols at
HTML Symbol Reference. Please refer to that for details about what symbols are available. This document is an attempt to give guidelines for
using those symbols
on E2.
Problems arise because all browsers are not created equal - the way symbols are displayed differ from one browser to the next. As we want our writeups to look good in any of these browsers (or if they can't look good, at least be intelligible) some guidelines may be useful. Also, E2 titles are a special case.
Writeups
At the present time, there are two browsers which see heavy use on the internet, so if someone is reading your writeup, the odds are they're using either
Mozilla Firefox or
Internet Explorer. E2 mixes both old and state-of-the-art web technology so any predictions are risky. Generally speaking, both will behave adequately, though the fact that most of our developers use browsers other than Internet Explorer may lead to certain elements being optimised for Firefox and tested less rigorously under MSIE. Any problems that arise should be reported and will be fixed if there is a server-side bug.
Just about all the HTML entities listed under Mathematical, Greek and Symbolic characters for HTML in HTML Symbol Reference should display properly in all modern browsers. Older browsers, in particular Netscape Navigator, are obsolete and should be replaced. Minority browsers like Konqueror and Opera may act a bit differently but should not depart very far from the norm
There are some special cases. For example — has a whole node to itself!
Titles
Pick Titles Carefully contains a nice long discussion about special characters in titles, but briefly:
- Never use HTML tags ("<foo") in titles.
- Never use HTML entities (of the form "&foo;") in titles.
- There's a way to get a few special characters in titles, but you need to do it correctly, as discussed in Pick Titles Carefully.
Links
If you want to hardlink to a title with no special characters, but you want the link to appear with the correct characters in your writeup, just use a
pipelink.
[Frere Jacques|Frère Jacques]
gives:
Frère Jacques.
And, on a related note, if you want to include HTML formatting tags in links, you can use pipelinks also:
[court-martial|court-<b>martial</b>]
gives
court-martial. See
html formatted hard links for the full treatment of this.
For more HTML nitpickery, see The Nitpicker's Guide to E2 Style and Formatting.
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