This post on Crooked Timber made me look into how to do these: I guess that a ˆ was the right combination — that time spent learning diacritical marks in French occasionally proves its worth — but how to do it in text, not HTML? On the Mac, it’s ‘option-i’ to get the circumflex and then whatever you want under it.
WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: Æ, Á, Â, etc.:
Are the mnemonic representations of ISO Latin 1 characters (e.g. in the subject or in
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Connolly/930106/ISOlat1.html) really necessary for HTML?As far as I can see, the question translates to ‘Is there anyone who’s going to be typing in these things by hand that can’t type the numeric references instead?’ and ‘Aren’t HTML editors going to be used to produce documents with these characters anyway, and can’t editors use the numeric representation just as easy as the mnemonic representation?’
This message — between Marc Andreessen, pre-Netscape, and Tim Berners-Lee, pre-knighthood — is almost exactly 12 years old: what do you think of the progress we’ve made?
When I see things like this and recall the battle for mindshare — I’d love to see a list of all the now-discontinued tags from the late 90s browsers — and think what an enormous waste of resources that all was. Are things better now? Is CSS better than tag soup? Undoubtedly. Could it have happened sooner and without a lot of wasted effort, by programmers devising these features and web designers using them, only to see them go away? I think so. I look at a tool like ecto, which I use to create these scintillating observations, and consider how quickly it came into existence, matured, and is now in its second release after a redesign — and with one programmer (albeit a very good one). Perhaps it’s not possible to do something like this in a group: would Linux have happened with more than one person at the earliest stages?
It would make a big difference to how people use software if features and chrome were more carefully weighed against usability from the user’s point of view. Again, to use ecto as an example: I think I have access to every menu, every option, and I still have a lot of room on my 12 inch iBook screen. Would that be the case in Word?