I'm implementing a mail-like web client and would like to copy the way
gmail handles selection and navigation via the '>' caret. I've tried
looking through the javascript code via Venkman but it seems obfuscated
and I can't make much sense of it. Does anyone know how they get the
caret to display? It doesn't apprear to be an ASCII character.
First of all, this question is unrelated to scripting. You had better asked
it in comp.infosystems.
www.authoring.misc.
I do not know what character GMail actually uses as I have no GMail account
(you should not assume everybody has, so you had better posted a relevant
code snippet of the resulting code). However, GMail must be based on
HTML or XHTML to work in a wide range of Web browsers; the Document
Character Set of these languages is UCS (Universal Character Set)-2 [1]
which translates to the Unicode character set.[2] So you should check
out the Unicode character tables first, particularly the Geometric Shapes
section.[3]
What you need to know regarding J(ava)Script is only that these are
implementations of the ECMAScript language standard.[4] So if you want to
display a UCS-2/Unicode character through scripting, you either must
declare a fitting encoding for the script resource and write the character
as is, or you must use a character escape sequence, such as "\u20AC" for
the Unicode Euro character.
But it could be as well that the "character" you are seeing is in fact only
a small image. Try invoking the context menu for that item and check out
its properties.
PointedEars (with a fitting random signature)
___________
[1] <URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html>
<URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets>
[2] <URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>
[3] <URL:
http://www.unicode.org/standard/where/>
[4] Official standard:
<URL:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm>
Latest revision: <URL:
http://mozilla.org/js/language/>
