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Nicole
Posts: 2845
Joined: 9/15/2004
From: Nambucca / Kempsey, Australia
Status: offline
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I'm a bit ⁄ 'd - 7/27/2008 23:52:42
I had this brilliant idea a while ago, that seeing as I absolutely hate updating and maintaining the table based site of my first ever and longest serving client, that I'd at least clean the code ... a lot! It was also the site of my first ever attempt at CSS for styling, therefore, as you can imagine I have a lot of inline styles mixed in with an external style sheet, so it's a pretty major job converting 900 pages to a cleaner style sheet while also cleaning the code.
Cutting to the chase, I thought I'd also try and learn some things while doing this, so I sneeked a peek under the hood of some fellow Outfronteers websites who'll remain completely nameless and noticed that they were using some character entities that I hadn't ever used before - so I started using them!
Most notably - ndash and frasl! Actually frasl was one that i found and started using.
But I've just discovered that Wikipedia has pages devoted to each character entity and their proper usage and I've noticed that "ndash" really should only be used to link things like "London – New York, whereas to hyphenate a word like silly-fool you should just use a bloody hyphen. I've also found that I've been using frasl where I could've been simply using a slash!
So I have learned something from this exercise, that sometimes I should just stick to what I was doing, but I've also learned a little about the english language and when to use certain characters.
I guess my question out of all this is what charset are you using, is one better than another or more accessible and what "easy" keyboard characters like the slash and dash are NOT universally used by most charsets?
Also, I've been spanning different languages and yesterday I came across a few pages that used French and Spanish names so I found myself wrapping them in lots and lots of spans like <span lang="fr">Henri</span>, does anybody else bother with this? Does it really tell proper screen readers to use a french accent?
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d a v e
Posts: 4168
Joined: 7/24/2002
From: England (but live in Finland now)
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RE: I'm a bit ⁄ 'd - 7/28/2008 2:03:22
i think it's pointless to use something like
<span lang="fr">Henri</span>
or <span lang="fr">Paris</span>
because you wouldn't do that in speech: would you pronounce cafe in a French way when you speak just because it's a French word?!
of course if you use a phrase or a quote from another language that hasn't been anglicized then of course wrap it language attributes.
to clarify - i use lang attributes on the first 4 words on this page for example http://www.deplicque.net/
Welcome! (nothing explicitly defined as it takes the default American English setting of the page/site)
Tervetuloa! (Finnish)
Sois le bienvenu! (French)
Välkommen! (Swedish)
and i suppose if i was going to say something like
'he had a certain je ne sais quoi' then i would wrap the French phrase in fr lang attribute. if i could be bothered :)
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David Prescott
Gekko web design
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d a v e
Posts: 4168
Joined: 7/24/2002
From: England (but live in Finland now)
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RE: I'm a bit ⁄ 'd - 7/28/2008 4:52:12
i think i would mark up anything that would need pronouncing as foreign that i would speak out loud as such, e.g. "Onri"
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David Prescott
Gekko web design
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