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Confirmation, Please?


hazelm

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I just noticed something when I absent-mindedly typed <G>.  I've been going to ask about this anyway.  Now I shall.  A few decades ago, you could not use those symbols (greater than and less than symbols) in a forum message box.  What you typed would not appear.  I do not know if that was only on certain software or everywhere but i learned to avoid those symbols.  Today, they worked with <G>.  At least where I used one, they worked.  So, please tell me.  Are those symbols totally usable on the internet now?  Thank you.

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In most web apps these days, if they give you a place to enter text, it will get saved as you type it, but when it's displayed, the software will translate "<" and ">" into the HTML-compliant codes "<" and ">"

 

You generally still can't use those and many others in filenames or paths, and you'll usually get an error when you try, but that's at the operating system level.

 

 

I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard, :phones:

Buffy

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So, I just lucked out with the grin?    At the time they didn't work (long ago) I was trying to use them around quotes.    I'll just continue with quotation marks.    Don't you wonder why they can't work?  Wonder if they work with math.  Anyway.  Thanks for reply.  I wanted to get that straight. 

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The reason angular brackets were "illegal" was because they're used to define tags in HTML. An HTML file looks like this:
 

<html>
<head><title>This is my page</title></head>
<body>
<h1>My page on the > and < characters</h1>
...
</body>
</html>

If you put a random "<" where the "<" is, the browser would be expecting you to be identifying a tag that it should use as an instruction as to how to lay out the page, and it will give you a nasty error message if it doesn't find a legitimate tag.

Of course many languages use the Guillemet for quote marks, but the provincial Americans didn't think about it when inventing HTML, so it's caused much grumbling once it started to spread around the world.

But this was in the days before you could put program code between the database and the display to "encode" the characters properly, so now we let you type whatever you want and then properly translate it before it's sent to your browser.




We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it, :phones:
Buffy

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