Quick check for ISO-8859-7 Greek

[Ioannis]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7">
tag, and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if non-Greek Windows computers
automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote above the
animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

Thanks very much,

 

[julianmlp]

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote above the
animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

No problem here. Mozilla FF 1.5.0.3

regards - julian

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7">

What are you trying to achieve? If you want native Greek, then using
iso-8859-7 is entirely plausible. If you primarily want to do
mathematics, then I wouldn't recommend it.

In any case, you haven't configured your server to set the proper
encoding, so you're relying on a meta http-equiv. (Which reminds me,
I really must rewrite my page on that topic. But I digress)

tag,

Tag? Inevitably, http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt ,
Part 5 (SCNR).

and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if non-Greek Windows
computers automatically display the Greek ok.

Generally speaking, current browsers will display Greek "OK", yes.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

You're pointlessly using antique markup, IMHO. I see no reason why
your content shouldn't be entirely suitable for modern (strict-ish)
markup, with stylesheet for presentation proposal(s). Even if that
wasn't your question.

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote
above the animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

It works, but it's not what I'd recommend for the material you are
offering there. In detail,
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist

h t h

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-7"> tag,

That's a surrogate for a real HTTP header, but in practice it works
sufficiently when the real HTTP headers do not conflict with it (as they
don't in your case).

and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if
non-Greek Windows computers automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

Well, it depends on whether the user's system has a font containing Greek
letters. Apart from that (and you can't really do anything to that), there
should be no problems. Surely no problem on my computer, with Finnish
version of Windows. The letters are all uppercase and lack stress marks
(tonos), but that seems to be how you have written them, perhaps to imitate
the ancient Greek writing.

On the other hand, why do you write a quotation in Greek when the page is
otherwise entirely in English? The vast majority of people who understand
English don't understand Greek, often not even the letters - they are all
Greek to them. (And the quotation does not specify the author and the
source. Though not legally required for an ancient quotation, lack of
credits suggests that you didn't actually check the quotation from the
original source but copied it from someone who didn't check the sources
either. In fact, _most_ "classical" quotations on web pages are more or less
wrong, or at least used out of their proper context.)

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote
above the animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

No technical problem with that. It's the text in English that is almost
unreadable, due to using black background (and not setting font face, which
mostly means that it defaults to Times New Roman, which is really hard to
read with "inverse colors").

 

[julianmlp]

btw, and sorry for the off topic.

Do you know any site which explains why:

d/dx[0] {lim x-->oo (1+1/x)^x} ^ x = 1

I mean, what is the relationship between the limit (1 + 1/x)^x and the
base of the exponential function A <==> d/dx[0]A^x = 1 (of course, A
has to be "2.7182....")

Again, sorry for the off topic

regards - julian

 

[Ioannis]

btw, and sorry for the off topic.

Do you know any site which explains why:

d/dx[0] {lim x-->oo (1+1/x)^x} ^ x = 1

******************************************************
This is offtopic, but here goes. The limit does not affect the last "x"
(it's outside the limit brackets)

lim_{x->+oo}(1+1/x)^x = e, so your expression above reduces to
d/dx[0]{e^x}. Now,
d/dx{e^x} = e^x, so,
d/dx[0]{e^x} = e^0 = 1.

You'd be better off asking such questions in the newsgroup sci.math.
********************************************************

Anyway, thanks to all the responders for the answers about the Greek
letters. Unfortunately my site is over 25 MB and I really can't bother to do
many structural updates/changes. It has over 200 pages. I could conceivably
update the deprecated html I am using, but this would require editing all
the pages and reuploading them. I don't have time for such a thing.

I mean, what is the relationship between the limit (1 + 1/x)^x and the
base of the exponential function A <==> d/dx[0]A^x = 1 (of course, A
has to be "2.7182....")

Again, sorry for the off topic

regards - julian

 

[Neredbojias]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-7"> tag, and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if
non-Greek Windows computers automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote
above the animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

Thanks very much,

It's all Greek to me...

 

[Sally Thompson]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7">
tag, and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if non-Greek Windows computers
automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote above the
animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

Don't know about Windows computers - don't Mac users do mathematics? <g> -
anyway, the Greek letters display fine on a Mac using Firefox and also using
Safari. However, I agree with the other comments about the bright colours on
the black background - difficult to read and doesn't look very professional
IMVHO*.

*in my very humble opinion

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7">
tag, and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if non-Greek Windows computers
automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote above the
animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

I checked you page on all of my browsers. I am using the Windows XP OS
with all updates including sp2, and the OS and all browsers are English
version.

The Greek characters displayed correctly on Mozilla 1.7.11, Netscape
8.0.4, Firefox 1.5.0.3, Opera 8.54, W3Cs Amaya 8.1b, SBC/Yahoo DSL
Version 6.00-XCSX;sp2 (slightly modified IE6), and the old Netscape
4.8.

I also viewed on a MSNTV Viewer 2.8[build 20] simulator program for the
old MSNTV set top box. This old box did not support Greek
characters(and many other things). It displayed Geek instead of Greek -
upper case English characters, each with different strange accent marks
above them. The old MSNTV boxes likely are down to under one million
units and are in the US only, although there once were some in Canada,
and there is a new version of the box (MSNTV2) that is completely
different and based on a watered down IE6 browser. The new version box
likely supports Greek, but I have not seen one.

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Need someone to check the display of Greek on my webpage. I am using a
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7">
tag, and not UTF-8 characters, so I am unsure if non-Greek Windows computers
automatically display the Greek ok.

http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/math/index.html

if you can, please tell me if the Greek letters in the cyan quote above the
animated .gif show up ok and not as gibberish.

I checked you page on all of my browsers. I am using the Windows XP OS
with all updates including sp2, and the OS and all browsers are English
version.

The Greek characters displayed correctly on Mozilla 1.7.11, Netscape
8.0.4, Firefox 1.5.0.3, Opera 8.54, W3Cs Amaya 8.1b, SBC/Yahoo DSL
Version 6.00-XCSX;sp2 (slightly modified IE6), and the old Netscape
4.8.

I also viewed on a MSNTV Viewer 2.8[build 20] simulator program for the
old MSNTV set top box. This old box did not support Greek
characters(and many other things). It displayed Geek instead of Greek -
upper case English characters, each with different strange accent marks
above them. The old MSNTV boxes likely are down to under one million
units and are in the US only, although there once were some in Canada,
and there is a new version of the box (MSNTV2) that is completely
different and based on a watered down IE6 browser. The new version box
likely supports Greek, but I have not seen one.

I have now found an appendix in Powells 4'th ed. of HTML & XHTML that
gives some data for support of Greek characters in some older browsers.
These include IE: 4, 5, 5.5; Netscape: 6,7; Opera 6.2, 7. This list
does not include all browsers and all older versions, so some other
browsers should support Greek characters also.

Support of Greek characters, even in English language browsers, is
extremely important because of their wide use in mathematics and
physics for symbols. For example, one of the classical texts concerning
theoretical physics by two professors at MIT goes through English
characters in uppercase, lower case and also boldface and italics as
well as some underlines and overlines. In addition they use both upper
and lower Greek cases. Still they run out of characters and use a few
Hebrew ones in their text. In mathematics and physics it is usual to
use a single character for each object such as "c" for the speed of
light in vacuum rather than perhaps "lightspeed" as might be done in
javascrapt math calculations. Of course all characters must be well
defined. This somewhat reminds me of an old joke about how you can tell
if a philosopher is good. A good philosopher spends 50 minutes in first
defining terms followed by ten minutes of his or her oral presentation
.

 

[Ioannis]

[snip]

I checked you page on all of my browsers. I am using the Windows XP OS
with all updates including sp2, and the OS and all browsers are English
version.

The Greek characters displayed correctly on Mozilla 1.7.11, Netscape
8.0.4, Firefox 1.5.0.3, Opera 8.54, W3Cs Amaya 8.1b, SBC/Yahoo DSL
Version 6.00-XCSX;sp2 (slightly modified IE6), and the old Netscape
4.8.

I also viewed on a MSNTV Viewer 2.8[build 20] simulator program for the
old MSNTV set top box. This old box did not support Greek
characters(and many other things). It displayed Geek instead of Greek -
upper case English characters, each with different strange accent marks
above them. The old MSNTV boxes likely are down to under one million
units and are in the US only, although there once were some in Canada,
and there is a new version of the box (MSNTV2) that is completely
different and based on a watered down IE6 browser. The new version box
likely supports Greek, but I have not seen one.

Many thanks! I appreciate you taking the time for this mini report!

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

The Greek characters displayed correctly on Mozilla 1.7.11, Netscape
8.0.4, Firefox 1.5.0.3, Opera 8.54, W3Cs Amaya 8.1b, SBC/Yahoo DSL
Version 6.00-XCSX;sp2 (slightly modified IE6), and the old Netscape
4.8.

Yes, support for Greek was already pretty good when Panos Stokas did a
Greek translation of my "quickstart" writeup -
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/quick.el.7-html - and that
was over 5 years ago now.

Here's a sample taken with NN4.08 in around 1998:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/multiling-nn4.08.jpg ,
cited from my page
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/browsers-fonts.html

Back then, the people who complained about not being able to browse
the test pages were usually found to have - not an inadequate browser
- but inadequate fonts. For example, the then-current MS Windows
versions installed by default with a very limited character repertoire
(especially for users in the USA). Multinational fonts had to be
installed by additional option, and many people didn't know they
needed to do that. That problem has, I think, pretty much gone away by
now.

I also viewed on a MSNTV Viewer 2.8[build 20] simulator program for
the old MSNTV set top box. This old box did not support Greek
characters(and many other things).

Indeed. The program which you have in mind (like the gadget which it
simulated) treated every character encoding as if it was Windows-1252,
minus a few of its characters. You won't get /any/ kind of
internationalised content on that version, so there's really no point
in discussing how to achieve that with HTML.

and there is a new version of the box (MSNTV2) that is completely
different and based on a watered down IE6 browser.

Right. I was sent a photo of one with Cyrillic characters displayed,
so I know it's capable. I would expect it to do Greek also.

The above is mostly historical background. I still think my best
advice on how to compose pages is what I give in my checklist:

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist

The idea is to work one's way down the list until a row meets one's
requirements. However, utf-8 is widely supported nowadays, both by
browsers and search engines. If the author is confident in working
with it, then it's a good choice. If not, then Unicode
references are good for things like mathematical symbols, with the
rest of the document encoding chosen from the checklist.

Don't on *any* account use Symbol-type fonts. They are a snare and a
delusion in HTML - even if they give an impression of working in MSIE.

good luck

 

[BusyGuy]

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist

Alan, one last post in here before I get back to work. I just looked at
your site and I'm in awe. Science, especially physics and astronomy,
are two of my loves. Asimov was my favorite author but I also enjoy
Hawkins and Feinstein. You must realy love your work!

I have a friend, a 20 year old girl from St Petersburg in Russia. Her
parents are astronomers in Colorado. She splits her time more or less
equally between the two places. She is already doing a doctorate in
something to do with particle radiation in/from the sun. Fascinating.