[vox-tech] Special Character Issues in a web page

[Richard Harke]

On Wed September 20 2006 10:06, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> This may be a dumb question, but can the backslash character be used to
> denote special characters on a webpage under some circumstances in addition
> to the ampersand?  I'm asking because as I review some of our old pages,
> some of our Spanish text pages seem to use, say, \351 to refer to the
> accented o character instead of ó or even &#351.  Strangely, when I
> worked on these pages in a text editor, those characters were rendered as
> strange characters, nothing like what they were supposed to be.
>
> Anyone have any thoughts?
A \ followed by three octal digits is a very old method of specifying
a character by its code. I used this technique to display accented
hungarian text on a web site recently. What you actually get on the
display will depend on the code set the browser is running but a lot
of the more common characters have the same code across
several code sets. At least this is true for the european languages;
I doubt if it holds for asian languages.
Richard