Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 11/19/07 17:07

Scripsit still just me:

> How universal is this symbol?

Which "this symbol"? It's poor style and poor communication to refer to a
heading in copy text.

The notation ° is not really a symbol but a notation, an entity
reference. Did you mean to ask about the entity reference, or about the
DEGREE SIGN character (°)? There's normally no reason to use the entity
reference in HTML authoring, since DEGREE SIGN is part of the iso-8859-1
character repertoire, and you probably use (or can use) the iso-8859-1
encoding.

> Can I depend on it's implementation at
> all or should I just superscript a small font ?

A browser that does not get the DEGREE SIGN right, whether it is included as
such in the encoding used or written as an entity reference, is so broken
that it makes little sense to try to cover such browsers. The only thing I
might really be worried about is that speech or Braille rendering might have
difficulties with it.

But your question "should I just superscript a small font" suggests that
your real question might not have anything to do with the degree sign, which
is _not_ a superscript. Specifically, it is _not_ superscript 0 (zero), it
is _not_ superscript o, and it is _not_ masculine ordinal indicator as used
e.g. in Spanish (e.g., 1º = primero), even though it may, by chance, look
much the same or identical.

So where would you use °? This is correct usage:
45° angle
32 °C (= 32 degrees centigrade)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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