HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
where browsers will understand the numeric code, but not the named entity.
You could pull in an XML entity declaration in an XSL style sheet to bind the items of
interest, but that is not reasonable and would get quite large, so most Web developers will
wait until such named entities are native.
N
OTE
HTML5 does document many Unicode entities, for example,
▾
but
the situation is no different for HTML5 than in previous efforts; little or no support is found at
the time of this edition's writing.
At this time and likely for some time in the future, it is preferable to use numeric entities
to insert any Unicode character into any supporting browser. For example, here
<p>
日本語
</p>
the entities produce the Kanji for “nihongo” or “Japanese language” shown next:
It should be noted that the appearance of Unicode characters may change dramatically
across browsers and systems, depending on the font supported. For example, notice the
obvious variation in the rendering of the previous example across the four most popular
browsers.
Depending on the font in place, in some cases the Unicode characters may not be
supported at all and most browsers will present the unsupported character icon, but notice
how some may indicate within it the Unicode value that is missing, which is slightly more
informative.
