Sherm said:
No, you don't need to use an entity reference for backslashes.
Right, "\" is just another data character in HTML. In software that
_generates_ HTML, e.g. a Perl or JavaScript program, things are different,
but that's a whole another world. Wait a sec... we have a web page about it,
don't I.... yes:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/revsol.html
That said, I see the same thing on your page,
I can confirm that too: on the page
http://fabpedigree.com/s061/f004932.htm
I see backslashes as struck-out "W" on IE 8 (Windows Vista).
and found other pages
for which back slashes are correctly displayed. It's worth noting that
those sites used valid HTML and "standards mode" rendering. Your page
lacks a doctype declaration, so it triggers "quirks mode," and has a
few HTML errors as well.
Good guess, and the HTML errors should be fixed of course, but neither the
markup errors nor "quirks mode" seem to affect the issue.
The issue is that some versions of IE apparently display "\" in that very
odd way, when font-family: serif is specified in CSS. That's weird, even for
IE.
It's really a font issue, as you can see if you copy and paste the text into
a text editor for example: there you see the fancy character turned into
"\".
I don't know which font it uses when font-family: serif is specified, but
it's apparently a broken font, with a completely wrong glyph for "\". This
is mad, but it can easily be fixed by changing the CSS rule.
Wait... we have
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm
and using it, one can see that the following fonts on my computer have a
struck-out "W" in place of "\":
Batang
BatangChe
Gulim
GulimChe
Gungsuh
GungsuhChe
Malgun Gothic
And I'm pretty sure those fonts came with the operating system. For more
weirdness, but more undertandably (though not acceptably), some fonts
display "\" as the yen symbol - this is understandable because some Asian
variants of Ascii have replaced "\" by the yen sign. Wait... the struck-out
"W" is the wong symbol, _of course_. So this is not completely absurd, just
mind-boggingly wrong, a return to the world where monsters called "national
variants of Ascii" ruled the Earth.
So probably serif means, to IE, one of those broken fonts. (Broken at least
in the sense of rendering one character completely wrong.) And this explains
why the issue may arise in Word, too - if the font somehow gets changed to
Batang, for example.
Specifying serif means in theory that the browser should use the serif font
chosen by the user (either by accepting the browser default for it or by
setting it), but this doesn't really work. One reason to that is that IE has
no tools for setting the meaning of the keyword serif.
Using e.g. font-family: xxx, "Times Roman", "Times New Roman" where xxx is
the serif font that you really prefer would be better. Virtually any browser
that supports multiple fonts at all can use Times New Roman or Times Roman,
which can hardly be worse than the meaning of the keyword serif when it has
oddities like this. And, of course, you can leave the font unspecified,
which normally means Times New Roman, or something that the user has
selected.
I don't think the use of "\" in the construction of "Ascii graphic" is
particularly advanced, but the late Bob Bemer, the inventor of the
backslash, probably wouldn't object to it. After all, part of the motivation
for this character was to make it possible to write the symbols for logical
disjunction and logical conjunction, as defined in the Algol programming
language, as pairs of Ascii characters: \/ and /\. So the particular visual
appearance was more or less part of the idea.