Talk:Numero sign

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[edit] №

Indefatigable has deleted mention of №. However, such browsers as Lynx and Links display it correctly. So it must not be so bogus. — Monedula 14:35, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's pretty poor reasoning. What determines whether № is a valid HTML entity is the official W3C HTML standard, not some random browser's implementation thereof. Lots of browsers support their own nonstandard entities, but that doesn't automatically make them valid HTML. —Psychonaut 16:06, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that the authors of Lynx have invented № out of nothing. Maybe it sits in some other standard that you have missed. — Monedula 13:51, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Maybe, but if so, then the onus is on you to provide the citation. Psychonaut 14:10, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Just to demonstrate o mhow the symbol appears using the code, here it is: &numero . It is not displayed in Fx2, which implements the W3C standard very closely, so I would assume it is non-standard HTML.

ftp://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MISC/SGML.TXT — Monedula 15:14, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Nothing in that file indicates that № is an HTML element. All it states is that № is an SGML entity for the ISO Cyrillic-2 set. But it's not even a primary source; as it states in the header, it's just some random programmer's compilation from various sources. Anyway, feel free to add this information to the article if you think it's of importance. (I don't, considering that pure SGML is rarely used nowadays, and almost no one reading English Wikipedia will care about Cyrillic SGML entities.) Psychonaut 15:35, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Masucline ordinal indicator

The article stated that the "o" in the numero sign is the masculine ordinal indicator. Until someone can provide a citation for that assertion, I changed the statement to say that it resembles the masculine ordinal indicator. I am more inclined to believe that the "o" represents the "o" in numero; it wouldn't make sense for it to be an ordinal indicator in the way that those indicators are normally used (unless one were trying to say "to the Nth degree", but I've never seen the numero sign used for that). — mjb 06:41, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

The masculine ordinal indicator in itself is, essentially, just superscript "o". — Monedula 16:40, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

In appearance, yes, but if one calls the "o" in the numero sign "masculine ordinal indicator" then it implies that the "o" has a certain meaning — modifying a preceding masculine number to make an ordinal out of it. In the way it is used in the numero sign, it does not have those semantics; it is just a superscript "o", AFAIK. — mjb 18:39, 20 August 2005 (UTC)