h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the case that this page is still a 'work on progress', ignore what I say here (well, not all of it).

I am quite disappointed. After the editing process my article contains more errors than before. I don't want to point out _all_ the typographical errors (maybe I am too concerned about this, but now there is really a lot of them) but why were most of the minus signs changed into hyphens while some minus signs survived? Why are dashes and hyphens arbitrary used for each other in the document (sometimes even within the same parenthesis)? Pretty chaotic now; and line breaking has become a problem now.

Much more serious: The only real mistake, namely that Prussia was the north-_eastern_ part of Germany, remained although I had pointed it out. And why where the external links removed except for the NIST? What's so special about the NIST? The British counterpart, the NPL, doesn't fit the guidelines? The German counterpart, the PTB, is also not good enough? The _international_ counterpart, mother of the whole system, the BIPM, isn't worth it, too? Sorry, I can't understand that. These pages are utterly free from racist or other unacceptable material. By the way, footnote 7 makes no sense any more because of this.

Some units cling to their respective number, others don't; some huge numbers are divided by commas, others by spaces, others by
breakable spaces so that the number itself can contain a line break(!).

There is a '<!- - correct so? -->' in the middle of the text. (Well, my answer is 'no')

It must have been a huge effort to embed all these flaws into my text. It can't have been done automatically, otherwise the errors would be more 'homogeneous'. It isn't unreadable now, but really a mess.

Please, please be more careful!

Apparently this _was_ in progress. My original correction wasn't available at that moment and the editor contacted me directly -- unfortunately I checked my email after the posting. Sorry.

Not patient enough ...

Not a problem

However, the minus signs are still a problem - at least to me.

All minus signs (in the temp table and in superscripts) are a question mark. This is probably because they are represented by character 8722 and Netscape (NS4.7 on NT4) is unable to represent them. I understand the pi not working, but there's no reason at all to use some funny minus sign. Was the article imported into a word processor (e.g. Word)? This often upsets certain characters (replacing single dahes by en-dash, for example).

This renders the article almost impossible to read unless you extract the source and do a search-replace.

Of course, if I'm being really picky, I might suggest that 8722 is a unicode character and, sure enough, if I change the META tag to show this as UNICODE-1-1-UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 (an 8 bit code) all characters (including pi) are suddenly OK.