I was recently looking for a good way to space out sentences using html instead of using . One of the sites I found mentioned using entities. Would this be considered good practice? I did refer to w3schools to see if this was valid html but they only seem to mention the entity.
In my eyes, using any spacing character is "bad" practice. This is because it may mess things up under different fonts/sizes/etc. conditions. I think you should use CSS for any type of spacing, unless it's something really basic (but 1-2 spaces max).
W3school only mentions because that's the most popular. Others aren't very common. In fact, I never heard of those other ones.
Related
I have seen   in html and can't quite tell what it does other than create some whitespace. I am wondering what exactly it does and when it should be used?
(it should have a semi-colon on the end) is an entity for a non-breaking space.
Use it between two words that should not have a line break inserted between them by word wrapping.
There is a good explanation about when this is appropriate grammar on the English StackExchange.
It is sometimes abused to create horizontal space between content in web pages (since it will not collapse like multiple regular spaces). Padding and margins should usually be used instead of this hack.
One reason for is to insert multiple spaces in a document.
In HTML, multiple whitespace characters are collapsed into one space. This includes tabs and newlines.
IF you wanted to display the following:
three spaces.
You could insert 3 entities instead of using spaces like so:
three spaces.
Edit: It's worth mentioning that is more of a historical artifact than anything else. Just about every use for it that is mentioned in the answers to this question has a better alternative means to accomplish that goal. However, is still with us, and these are some of the things people have used it for.
See also: http://www.sightspecific.com/~mosh/www_faq/nbsp.html
I don't know if this answers your question or not and certainly this answer is not of the caliber already provided by others, but the beauty of a discussion thread or Q&A site is the diversity of experience that might be found in it. So, on that note, I'll share with you what I've used nbsp; for. (To be perfectly honest, 24 hours ago, nbsp; was something I had never even heard of.)
Here's how I used nbsp;. I was posting something using markdown language and I had a very simple two-item bulleted list. For the life of me I could not get the spacing before this list and after to look symmetrical. So, I did a web search and somehow ended up taking a look at this thread.
Before using nbsp; the paragraph that followed bullet point #2 collapsed the spacing between the bulleted point and the text, making it look as if the paragraph had something to do with bullet #2, specifically (which was not the case). I tried a lot of different things that I can't even remember now, but the one thing that ultimately worked was insertion of nbsp;.
Since then, I've been seeing all sorts of posts that indicate some controversy over its use, but for non-coders who need to wrangle out of an unsightly/misleading formatting issue, nbsp; is a very quick and useful fix.
I have searched and have read about this question. Some questions here:
Uppercase or lowercase doctype?
Should HTML meta charset be lowercase or uppercase?
and elsewhere have discussed it partially (as you can see in these 2 questions).
But what about tag names, and attributes?
I know both uppercase and lowercase are valid, but I want to know if there is benefits using each one?
update: the only benefit I have seen is compatibility with xhtml in lowercase way.
You should use lowercase letters because they are the 'correct' way of doing things (XHTML). It's basically a standard among everyone so that everything is consistent.
Even if you don't agree with the HTML is XML argument (I certainly do), almost all web developers use lowercase and many will get upset when they are forced to use uppercase letters and it will certainly lead to inconsistencies in your markup and CSS which is not a good thing.
Words formed all in capital letters are actually more difficult to read also without having the varying heights of letters (eg. a, l, p) to give your brain hints so you can skim the text faster.
There are no benefits. It's only about readability. Choose the one that suits you.
Fact: Usually, on the Internet, when someone writes text in all uppercase, it means that he is "RUDE".
I'm wondering if it's a bad idea to use weird characters in my code. I recently tried using them to create little dots to indicate which slide you're on and to change slides easily:
There are tons of these types of characters, and it seems like they could be used in place of icons/images in many cases, they are style-able and scale-able, and screen readers would be able to make sense of them.
But, I don't see anyone doing this, and I've got a feeling this is a bad idea, I just can't decide why. I guess it seems too easy to be true. Could someone tell me why this is or isn't okay? Here are some more examples of the characters i'm talking about:
↖ ↗ ↙ ↘ ㊣ ◎ ○ ● ⊕ ⊙ ○ △ ▲ ☆ ★ ◇ ◆ ■ □ ▽ ▼ § ￥ 〒 ￠ ￡ ※ ♀ ♂ &⁂ ℡ ↂ░ ▣ ▤ ▥ ▦ ▧ ✐✌✍✡✓✔✕✖ ♂ ♀ ♥ ♡ ☜ ☞ ☎ ☏ ⊙ ◎ ☺ ☻ ► ◄ ▧ ▨ ♨ ◐ ◑ ↔ ↕ ♥ ♡ ▪ ▫ ☼ ♦ ▀ ▄ █ ▌ ▐ ░ ▒ ▬ ♦ ◊
PS: I would also welcome general information about these characters, what they're called and stuff (ASCII, Unicode)?
There are three things to deal with:
1. As characters in a sentence/text:
The problem is that some fonts simply do not have them. However since CSS can control font use you probably will not run into this problem. As long as you use a web safe font, and know that that character is available in that font, you should probably be okay.
You can also use an embedded font, though be sure to fall back on a web safe font that contains the character you need as many browser will not support embedded fonts.
However sometimes certain devices will not have multiple fonts to choose from. If that font does not support your character you will run into problems. However depending on what your site does and the audience you are targeting this may not be a problem for you. Not to mention that devices like that are very old, and uncommon.
All in all it was probably not a good idea a handful of years ago, but now you are not likely to have problems as long as you cover all your bases.
It is important however to point out that you should never hard code those characters, instead use HTML entities. Just inserting those characters into your code can lead to unpredictable results. I recently copied some text from Word directly into my code, Word used smart quotes (quote marks that curve inwards properly). They showed up fine in Notepad++, but when I viewed the page I did not get quotes, I got some weird symbol.
I could have either replaced them with normal quotes " or with HTML entities to keep the style “ and ” (“ and ”).
Any Unicode character can be inserted this way (even those without special names).
Wikipedia has a good reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
2. As UI elements:
While it may be safe to use them in many cases, it is still better to use HTML elements where possible. You could simply style some div elements to be round and filled/not filled for your example.
As far as design goes they are really limiting, finding one that fits with the style of your page can be a hassle, and may mean that you will definitely need to embed a font, which is still only supported by the latest browsers.
Plus many devices do not support heavy font manipulation, and will often display them poorly. It works in the flow of your text, but as a vital part of the UI there can be major problems. Any possible issue one of those characters can bring will be multiplied by the fact that it is part of your UI.
From an artistic stand point they simply limit your abilities too much.
3. What are you doing?
Finaly you need to consider this:
Text is for telling
Image is for showing
HTML is for organizing
CSS is for making things look good while you show them
JavaScript is for functionality
Those characters are text, they are for telling someone something. So ask the question: "What am I doing?" and then use what was designed for that task. If you are telling use them, if you are showing use Image, or CSS.
I've seen this done before (the stars) and I think it's an awesome idea! It's also becoming quite popular to use a font (with #font-face) full of icons, like this one: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/
I can't see any downside to using a font like "font awesome" (only the upsides you mention like scalabilty and the ability to change color with CSS). Perhaps there's a downside to using the special characters you mention but none that I know of.
The problem with using those characters is that not all of them are available in all fonts used by all users, which means your application may look strange, or in the worst case be unusable. That said, it is becoming more common to assume the characters available in certain common fonts (Apple/Microsoft's Arial, Bitstream Vera). You can't even assume that you can download a font, as some users may capture content for offline reading with a service like Instapaper or Read It Later.
There are a number of problems:
Portability: using anything other than the 7-bit ASCII characters in code can make your code less portable, as recipients may use the wrong encoding. You can do a lot to mitigate this (eg. use UTF16 or at least UTF-8 encoded files). Most languages allow you to specify strings in characters using some form of escape notation (eg. "\u1234" in C#), which will avoid the problem, but loses some of the advantages.
Font-dependency: user interface elements that depend on special characters being available in a font may be harder to internationalize, since those glyphs might not be in the font that you want/need to use for a particular audience.
No color, limited choice of art: while font glyphs might seem useful to a coder, they probably look pretty poor to a UI designer.
The question is very broad; it could be split to literally thousands of questions of the type “why shouldn’t I use character ... in HTML documents?” This seems to be what the question is about—not really about code. And it’s about characters, seen as “weird” or “uncommon” or “special” from some perspective, not about character encodings. (None of the characters mentioned are encoded in ASCII. Some are encoded in ISO-8895-1. All are encoded in Unicode.)
The characters are used in HTML documents. There is no general reason against not using them, but loads of specific reasons why some specific characters might not be the best approach in a specific situation.
For example, the “little dots” you mention in your example (probably not dots at all but circles or bullets), when used as control elements as you describe, would mean poor usability and poor accessibility. Making them significantly larger would improve the situation, but this more or less proves that such text characters are not suitable for controls.
Screen readers could make sense of special characters if they used a database of various properties of characters. Well, they don’t, and they often fail to read properly even the most common special characters. Just reading the Unicode name of a character can be cryptic or outright misleading. The proper reading would generally depend on meaning and context.
The main issue, however, is that people do not generally recognize characters in the meanings that you would assign to them. How many people know what the circled plus symbol “⊕” stands for? Maybe 1 out of 1,000, optimistically thinking. It might be all right to use in on a page about advanced mathematics or physics, especially if the notation is defined there. But used in general text, it would be just… a weird character, and people would read different meanings into it, or just get puzzled.
So using special characters just because they look cool isn’t a good idea. Even when there is time and place for a special character, there are technical issues with them. How many fonts do you expect to contain “⊕”? How many of those fonts do you expect Joe Q. Public to have in his computer? In this specific case, you would find the font coverage reasonably good, but you would still have to analyze it and write a longish list of font names in your CSS code to cover most platforms. In the pile of poo case (♨), it would be unrealistic to expect most people to see anything but a symbol for unrepresentable character. Regarding the methods of finding out such things, check out my Guide to using special characters in HTML.
I've run into problems using unusual characters: the tools editor, compiler, interpreter etc.) often complain and report errors. In the end, it wasn't worth the hassle. Darn western hegemony, or homogeneity, or, well, something!
When i designing my site i came across a two empty space need for an alignment and i had use Alt+0160 for that and it looks fine and good. But i need to know that is this way legal for designing?
It may look fine in your browser, with your specific font settings, but awful in other environments.
No, don't use characters for styling.
In html you should use non-breaking space. You can code it using or , but try to use css instead of nbsp to style your website. It should behave better in all browsers. :)
The page does not contain Alt+0160. It contains the NO-BREAK SPACE character (U+00A0) generated by the key combination Alt+0160 on Windows. The character is valid and often useful, but using it for visual formatting is usually not a good idea, partly because CSS lets you affect the formatting in much more fine-grained way.
When you use NO-BREAK SPACE, then using the character itself (as opposite to or or  ) has the benefit and disadvantage of looking like a space in HTML source in most programs that you use for viewing it. It makes the content look cleaner, but it is difficult to notice when you need to (or should) pay attention to different space characters.
I tend to avoid , but it is a legal character and you won't face any issues because of it. I do, however, feel that using CSS's margin, padding, text-indent, etc (depending on what you're trying to accomplish) is a much neater way of doing the same thing.
If you do use it, I would recommend using instead of Alt+0160 to make it clear that you are using them.
hi when i write css or html i found that i want add two name like this
web-development
web_development
which one is better according SEO or write style name, file name or image name.
The first one is better. Also see this post by Google employee Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
use the dash. Google engines don't really parse underscores. This is maybe for programmers sanity, so that when they search for query_function, they get results they are looking for?
If you have a url like "http://example.com/web-site", google will return results for 'web', 'site' and '"web site"'. This is not the case for underscores: web_site will only return results for web_site.
ps.
I also think that dashes are better than underscores for usability purposes: a dash is a single button on the keyboard, while an underscore requires two buttons to be pressed. This has nothing to do with the technical side of SEO, but everything to do with usability, which is more important than SEO imo.
for css i don't think there is some issues with naming methodology, but for naming HTML pages - is preferred as search engines take - as space, even though good page name is not enough for good s.e.o. you need to have proper meta tag and keywords.
And make sure all your images have proper title tag, this is real essential.
Isn't it common practice to use the - to connect two words, and the _ to replace a space in situations where you can't use a space/+ sign, like CSS classNames?
first one is better in terms of SEO. Because the priority of hiphen is greater than under score
Please list two (2) words in the English language that use underscores ("_") within them.
Now list fifty (50) words that use dashes/hyphens ("-").
My opinion is that the hyphens would be a better solution for SEO.
IMO When it comes down to SEO is that everything makes a difference !
You are dealing with two different problems: URLs and CSS.
For URLs, hyphens would be the better choice because of SEO.
However, depending on your editing program, underscores might work better for mutli-word class names. In TextMate for instance, I can hit Esc to finish (auto-complete) a class I previously entered. It stops completing when it encounters a hyphen, but will fill in the whole class name when you use an underscore. If this is not the case for your editor, then it is really up to your preference.