Hacker News Reader

Strictly speaking, it's a slash not a solidus.

Unicode actually gets it wrong, the character / SOLIDUS is not a solidus at all, it is a (forward) slash. A solidus has a much more shallow angle and was used as a separator in old British currency, and is still used in Mathematics. Ironically the Unicode character for an actual solidus is ⁄ FRACTION SLASH.

Further reading: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Solidus...

View on HN

That makes his use of the term "solidus" a bit baffling (maybe it's referred to as such somewhere in the HTML5 specs?). I actually assumed he must mean both the characters in "/>" -- glad you mentioned it before I made a fool of myself somewhere.

Yes, it's in the HTML spec as "solidus" because Unicode 0x47 is "SOLIDUS". That's the right thing to do in an important spec. It's just confusing in a blog post though, as most people have not heard of a solidus, and now they've learnt it wrong!

I’ve always used the term “solidus” whenever I refer to the slash in `/>` in self-closing elements in XML/XHTML.

In any other situation I’d call it a slash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com