Improving Wetware

Because technology is never the issue

Fun with XHTML

Posted by Pete McBreen 09 May 2010 at 13:01

I’ve been looking at XHTML specifications recently and was surprised at the number of special symbols that are defined.

From simple things like ¬ ¬ and © © — to much more esoteric ones like ƒ ƒ. I can see the need for them, but the sheer number means that unless you use them all the time there will be the need to look them up.

I like the math set though, forall ∀ part ∂ exist ∃ empty ∅ nabla ∇ even if I have never had much use for these outside of math and logic classes. Similarly the arrows are nice harr ↔ looks neat, but not something I use a lot.

Overall there are some useful symbols in XHTML, and it sure beats trying to remember the key code to type them. After all brvbar ¦ is easier to type than trying to find the broken pipe symbol on the keyboard. sect § and macr ¯ could also be useful when annotating documents.