HTML & CSS: The Good Parts

Glossary

Ancestor

An element higher in the document tree, possibly many levels higher, that contains the element in question. Cf. Child.

ANSI

American National Standards Institute. In the U.S. technology industries, ANSI can be considered an analog to Ecma International (formerly known as ECMA). Its name is raised in relation to fonts because the early Windows character encodings were based on a draft standard that was first advanced by ANSI before being taken up and published by the ISO (International Standards Organization). Cf. Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-x.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange: the earliest character set that had a viable claim to universal support in the English-speaking world, and ubiquitous almost 50 years after its introduction. Limited to simple Latin glyphs used in English, whitespace characters, and teletype-specific control and transmission characters. Practically all Latin letterforms and punctuation without diacritics are encoded to ASCII code positions.

Attribute

Additional information about an element, presented as name/value pairs within the opening tag.

Basic Multilingual Plane

The range of Unicode code positions from U+0000 to U+FFFF (0–65535 decimal). Contains nearly all orthography used on a daily basis, without regard to origin.

Blackletter

A style of type inspired by German calligraphy of the late Middle Ages, and strongly identified with Germany to the present day. Sometimes called “Gothic,” but this is an anachronism.

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