HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
following HTML5 code creates a fi gure box containing an inline image of one of the
J-Prop Shop's products and a caption:
<figure>
<img src=”stick03.png” alt=”Master Stick” />
<figcaption>Master Stick ($39.95)</figcaption>
</figure>
The
figure
element doesn't necessarily need to contain an inline image. It can be
used to mark any content that stands aside from a main article but is referenced by it.
For instance, it could be used to contain an excerpt of a poem, as the following code
demonstrates:
<figure>
<p>'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves<br />
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;<br />
All mimsy were the borogoves,<br />
And the mome raths outgrabe.
</p>
<figcaption>
<cite>Jabberwocky,
Lewis Carroll, 1832-98</cite>
</figcaption>
</figure>
As with other HTML elements, the exact appearance of a fi gure box is determined by
a style sheet. At this time, Dave does not need to create a fi gure box for his company's
home page.
Working with Character Sets and Special
Characters
Dave likes the work you've done so far on the Web page. He has only one remaining
concern: The company's address in the page footer is diffi cult to read because the street
address, city name, zip code, and phone number all run together on one line. Dave
would like to have the different parts of the address separated by a solid circular marker
( • ). However, this marker is not represented by any keys on your keyboard. How, then,
do you insert this symbol into the Web page?
Character Sets
Every character that your browser is capable of rendering belongs to a collection of char-
acters and symbols called a
character set
. Character sets come in a wide variety of sizes.
For English, no more than about 127 characters are needed to represent all of the upper-
and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, spaces, and special typing symbols
in the language. Other languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, require character sets
containing thousands of symbols. Beyond the basic characters used by a language are
special characters such as ©, ½, π, and ®. Thus, a complete character set that includes
all possible printable characters is made up of hundreds of symbols.
The character set used for the alphabet of English characters is called
ASCII
(
American
Standard Code for Information Interchange
). A more extended character set, called
Latin-1
or the
ISO 8859-1
character set,
supports 255 characters and can be used by most
languages that employ the Latin alphabet, including English, French, Spanish, and Italian.
Unicode
, the most extended character set, supports up to 65,536 symbols and can be
used for any of the world's languages. The most commonly used character set on the Web
is
UTF-8
, which is a compressed version of Unicode and is probably the default character
set assumed by your browser. You can learn more about character sets by visiting the W3C
Web site and the Web site for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority at
www.iana.org.
