25 Dec
2008
25 Dec
'08
12:38 a.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
On Wed, 24 Dec 2008, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Just to clarify, I presume everybody dealing with html knows about "&blah;"
for
special characters; what I don't see in the ref I have is the 'lt' and
'gt' in
the list of special characters. I either saw them in an example somewhere or
guessed at them.
Are you asking how to get < and > rendered
as displayed text?
Try:
...the <BOLD> tag will...
(I'm not sure how I know this, I can't find it in the html reference I use;
which begs the question of whether it's actually part of the standard.)
< is the "less than" character
> is the "greater than" character how would you get HTML to display:
"< is the "less than" character"
would I have to "escape" the ampersands?
&lt;
Well, I guessed at that one too (presaging the question), and it works.
I guess that "modern" HTML has evolved to
the point where one MUST use an
HTML generating program, and no more tampering with the raw HTML; just as
"nobody" writes Postscript.
If you're complaint is that html is poorly defined in the detail, or difficult
to find a good concise reference for the details, I'm right there with you.
All the books I use to run across about html in the 90's were voluminous
hold-you-by-hand and walk-you-down-the-garden-path blatherings that took ten
pages to tell the simplest thing and still couldn't manage to be comprehensive.
I eventually found one that was 90% fluff (not an exaggeration) but the
remaining 10% (the appendix) presented a reasonable reference.
I still do hand-coded html for web pages, probably considered ugly by
current expectations, but at least makes for fast and consistent loading and
rendering.