April 04, 2002

Browser support for extended characters

HTML forced many typographical limitations onto designers. Some, like exact font specification, are unavoidable. Others, like extended characters, are not, but are so inconvenient few people bother using them. As a result, many features of fine typography like curly quotation marks, dashes and ellipses are all but extinct on screen and many designers are no longer even aware of their existence, or resort to semantically meaningless GIFs for special characters. These things matter.

If clumsy editing tools weren’t enough of a problem, browser manufacturers compounded it through their incomplete support for character entity references. The former problem is modestly addressed by my Dreamweaver and Textpad modifications.

As for the browser support, aardvark created the invaluable Character Entity Chart (required reading before any of this will make any sense), and advises that “to be sure a particular browser supports the entities (both named and numeric), simply open your browser to this page and view the charts”. Unfortunately, without a reference you cannot be entirely sure whether a character is displaying correctly, and not all of us have the means or time to test them. For that purpose I’ve started the numeric entity browser support table [200kb]. Update: Anyone wishing to contribute reports use this Excel file: table.xls.

Here are some conclusions, observations and questions I’ve drawn from it so far:

• Use numeric entities if unsure — I have not yet found any case where the character entity is supported, but not the numeric. I have found some instances of the opposite case.
• At the very least, get into the habit of using curly single and double quotations, en- and em-dashes.
• It’s a whole different kettle of fish for non-English writers, but I haven’t looked into this yet.
• I put spaces either side of an em-dash — even though it is not correct, the dashes are so short in Opera that it would look ridiculous without spaces. It’s a small sacrifice.
• I’m very disappointed with Opera 5, whose entity support is almost as bad as the v.4 browsers.
• I’d like to use the multiplication sign, which occurs in my writing quite often — e.g. 800×600, which looks much better than 800x600, especially if using a serif font. But can I sacrifice NN4.7Mac, for users of which it’ll be meaningless?
• Ditto for vulgar fractions ¼ ½ and ¾.
• Ditto for ellipsis, for Opera’s sake this time…
• Anybody got any recommendations for arrows? Can we rely on Wingdings or ZapfDingbats?
• Mathematical characters are very badly supported. Looks like maths sites would have to stick to GIFs.
• What’s the deal with the Diamond card?
• I'm very interested in support for the soft hyphen. Please get in touch if you’ve tested it.
• Using these entities is still an uphill task, due to editing tools, content provision and job descriptions. A subject for a future rant.

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