Ever wonder just exactly how some of those "fancy" characters are put into an html page?
if you've been practicing what we've been teaching, no doubt you've run into these sorts of problems. For instance, what happens when you want
to put something 10 spaces into the page? You can't just push the space bar 10 times and expect it to work, because HTML ignores all the
spaces after the first one.
Another problem comes about when you want to use foriegn currency symbols, greek letters, or symbols like the greater and less than sign.
So how DO we do such things. Well, several methods have been developed. Let's discuss a few of them:
Many years ago, before WINDOWS as we know it was developed, everything was accomplished in TEXT.
Back then, what graphics there were, were simple.
( 0 > < 0 )
=
\____/
Back in the day..... we used to make complete murals out of text that we would send to each other. Of course, we didn't have the luxury of disk storage
back then, so we would type it out on a teletype, and it would be punched onto a form of ticker-tape
( a spool of paper with holes punched into it for each character ). We would feed the ticker-tape into the teletype and transmit it, hoping that
it didn't break somewhere in the middle. Oh the things you do when you're bored.
And to create a character like the È was a bit of a kludge. So certain codes were encapsulated into the ASCII language called extended
ASCII. They were accessed by pressing and holding down the [ ALT ] key while typing a 3 digit number. So an [ ALT ] 200 would give you
a È character. An [ ALT ] 128 would give you € and so on. That was also limited though.
By the time HTML was created, it was understood that the language would be used to create mathematical and scientific papers, so a method was
implemented which would allow such characters as Ω and Σ It was called the Ampersand codes. Simply by typing an Ampersand ( & )
followed by certain characters and ending in a semicolon, one could create important symbols, like the greater > and less than < symbols,
which might otherwise mean something entirely different in a web page!
For instance, in order to create the ampersand symbol itself, the HTML code is: & The Ω
symbol is Ω the Σ symbol is Σ and the σ symbol is
σ Note the difference in capitalization changes it!
When typing an HTML page, gators < > have a special meaning. When you try to include them on an HTML page, the page does crazy things.
So how does one write a web page about how to write web pages? You MUST teach folks how to use the gator symbols, so you HAVE to include them
within the viewable text! Once again, the Ampersand codes come in handy. < = < and > = > Pretty cool huh?
Another discreet posibility, though, is to create a bitmap image ( a picture ) of the specific character you want in a program like MS Paint,
save it as a .gif or .jpg, then use it whenever you want to by calling up the image.This, of course, is bandwidth and memory restrictive, as
pictures take up more memory than text. This can really come in handy when creating, say, the first letter of a gothic tale, like one used to find in
very old, very fancy books.
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