A Conversation for Trigonometry
Greek Letters and Browsers
Gnomon - time to move on Started conversation Dec 14, 2000
I'm using Internet Explorer 5 and it doesn't show the letter theta correctly. It just shows a square. Maybe you should use a normal letter such as A or X instead of a Greek letter, to get around this problem.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Smiley Ben Posted Dec 14, 2000
Actually this is a total lie. What with being the MOST standards compliant browser *ever* (except perhaps Mozilla, which it's built on) Netscape *6* is much more likely to get it right than a Microsoft product. So update your browser and it'll work...
Greek Letters and Browsers
Phil Posted Dec 14, 2000
It's not just a matter of browser. The correct encoding needs to be selected and the correct fonts need to be installed.
Tell me what I need to view this with Navigator 4.7 under FreeBSD nad I'll try it out...
Greek Letters and Browsers
Demosthenes Posted Dec 15, 2000
Look, I'm using a IE mac client, and that theta was rendered so well, i thought it was an image for a second. maybe if you would check and make sure you don't have your own fonts overriding all others in the preferences, the page's own font will be rendered and give you the correct char. There is no reason IE should mess that kind of thing up.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Demosthenes Posted Dec 15, 2000
Look, I'm using a IE mac client, and that theta was rendered so well, i thought it was an image for a second. maybe if you would check and make sure you don't have your own fonts overriding all others in the preferences, the page's own font will be rendered and give you the correct char. There is no reason IE should mess that kind of thing up. And you are supposed to use theta in that case because its a measure of an angle, not just any old variable.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Gnomon - time to move on Posted Dec 15, 2000
It's perfectly acceptable to use a capital letter as an angle in trigonometry.
I find that in my own HTML pages, θ works but ϑ doesn't.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Phil Posted Dec 15, 2000
Somes you win, somes you lose. I guess I'll be happy knowing enough to be able to read the article and know what it means and what the symbols should be.
I supose that you could use almost anything instead of the symbols as long as what it means is defined.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Cefpret Posted Dec 15, 2000
Apparently somebody's changed the ϑ's to θ's. A good decision because it's not very nice to use latin letters as angles.
However I still intent to use ϑ's in some of my articles because this special shape is the only one used on star maps.
Fact is that it's part of HTML 4. See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html
IE 5 doesn't support it, NS6 does. This is independent of the encoding or font setting. It is only a matter of time until it's supported by all new browser versions.
To Smiley Ben: NS6 has it's own problems with recpecting standards: Visit http://www.h2g2.com/A471476 using NS6 and Classic GOO and tell me whether you can read the table captions.
Maybe the h2g2 parser could map ϑ to θ until it's better supported. Would be a clean solution.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Mark Moxon Posted Dec 15, 2000
Blame me - I changed ϑ to θ (even though the former is technically the correct entity to use). Hopefully this makes it *slightly* better, but we knew this entry would be problematic, and hey, we were right.
Hey ho. 
Greek Letters and Browsers
Phil Posted Dec 15, 2000
It all sounds like a re-run of the arguments from the article on PI and the greek letters...
Greek Letters and Browsers
Joe aka Arnia, Muse, Keeper, MathEd, Guru and Zen Cook (business is booming) Posted Dec 16, 2000
Wait until the maths institute gets some articles through... *shudders*
Greek Letters and Browsers
Smiley Ben Posted Dec 16, 2000
Please take a look at this page: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.h2g2.com%2FA471476
- I strongly suspect Netscape 6 / Mozilla / Gecko are rendering it perfectly according to the standards. There aren't /allowed/ to be captions there - there aren't even allowed to be tables!!!
Greek Letters and Browsers
Cefpret Posted Dec 16, 2000
The validator doesn't complain about the caption tag. Actually, I don't think that it's a very useful tool. It even doesn't like the tag.
Anyway, the Guide uses table captions properly as can be seen at http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html Furthermore, NS6 actually displays captions properly (as far as e.g. position is concerned). But NS6 doesn't take the _colour_ from the surrounding entity. Since I can't see the reason, I call this a bug.
Greek Letters and Browsers
Smiley Ben Posted Dec 16, 2000
Oooh. That actually is really hard to read!
To be fair, though, you can't really claim that the validator isn't a useful tool considering that browsers have no responsibility whatsoever to display /anything/ if that page comes up with a complaint, and the fact is that if it doesn't standards compliant browsers, including Mozilla, K-Meleon, Galeon and Netscape 6 should display the page exactly the same...
As to the captions, I don't think it's fair to say that they aren't /respecting/ the standards, since it is a bug, and will be fixed, rather than one of these things that Microsoft claims are 'features'...
Key: Complain about this post
Greek Letters and Browsers
- 1: Gnomon - time to move on (Dec 14, 2000)
- 2: Smiley Ben (Dec 14, 2000)
- 3: Phil (Dec 14, 2000)
- 4: Demosthenes (Dec 15, 2000)
- 5: Demosthenes (Dec 15, 2000)
- 6: Gnomon - time to move on (Dec 15, 2000)
- 7: Phil (Dec 15, 2000)
- 8: Cefpret (Dec 15, 2000)
- 9: Mark Moxon (Dec 15, 2000)
- 10: Phil (Dec 15, 2000)
- 11: Joe aka Arnia, Muse, Keeper, MathEd, Guru and Zen Cook (business is booming) (Dec 16, 2000)
- 12: Smiley Ben (Dec 16, 2000)
- 13: Cefpret (Dec 16, 2000)
- 14: Smiley Ben (Dec 16, 2000)
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