How do you portably get chracters like ‘≠’ and ‘™’ into your HTML?
Things are much better now, but it used to be that the Windows non-standard CP-1252 encoding was making things difficult on the Internet as people published pages using it and Microsoft browsers incorrectly displayed it as CP-1252 instead of ISO 8859-1 while everybody else saw weird funny characters in strange places because of this. And, conversely, Microsoft browsers would display perfectly reasonable ISO 8859-1 characters as the wrong thing. HTML ampersand entities were a way of unambiguously specifying which character you really meant so that no matter which encoding the browser used your page would look as intended.
With UTF-8 being nearly universal now, this is not nearly so much of an issue.
Most of the links I used to have here have gone dead. And so rather than give useless information, I have just removed them. I left the original page in an HTML comment if you are really interested, and I may get around to finding better links.
This book was ground breaking once. It introduced people to a lot of interesting design ideas making use of templates. It is one of the first places where it was explicitly recognized that templates were Turing complete, and explored the implications in detail.
Now, it is kind of 'old-hat'. And some of the tricks have been superceded by C++ language features that are much more convenient to use and much more clearly express your intent.
The above is a truly excellent manual of C and Unix functions.
X-Pad: avoid browser bug
- OK, so
that isn't the most stunning technical article someone else has written, but
I had a hard time finding that with Google.