OT: HTML queries (was Re: PDF datasheets)

[Brent Hilpert]

Fred Cisin wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 24 Dec 2008, Brent Hilpert wrote:
> > 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

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.


> 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.