What happened to the UK Pound sign?

Somewhere along the development of HTML, the World Wide Web, and computers in general, it appears as though UK users got overlooked. The "pound" sign does not appear in the lower ASCII characters... and the upper ASCII characters are anything but standardized. Some character fonts do not even include it at all!

The designers of HTML realized that in order for the World Wide Web to truly become international, accented and other "non-English" characters had to become standardized. But rather than preach to all the different font makers out there, they decided on a different scheme. These characters would be represented in HTML by special commands (for example, &eacute becomes é when viewed with a WWW browser, and it's up to the WWW browser to do the character translations for the particular font being used).

However, again UK computer users seem to have been overlooked, since we haven't been able to find any codes to represent the "pound" symbol. One of the Web browsers may have addressed this issue, but since we haven't found its reference in any of the "standard" tables, one can only infer that even if it is considered with some browsers, it definitely isn't a standard (again!).

There is a bit of hope... HTML, as well as the Internet in general, seems to be adopting an upper-ASCII standard known as ISO-8859-1, which luckily is very similar to the standard character mapping used by the Amiga computer. And the "pound" symbol occurs in this character mapping, encoded as ASCII 163. HTML lets us encode ASCII characters as &#xxx;, so £ gives us "£".

So, if you are using a Web browser and character font which adheres to this emerging standard, the pound symbol should appear properly. If not, you'll see some seemingly random character in its place.

You may wonder what brought this up. In writing The Digital Universe hypertext and encyclopedia of astronomy, we realized the incredible contributions made to astronomy by non-English speaking people. We felt that the least we could do to honor these individuals was to spell their names correctly, with the proper accents (it is amazing at how many English-language publications just toss aside the accents as though they weren't important!). The British pound symbol seems to suffer from the same type of oversight as accented characters... and we wanted to do our best to make things appear the way that they should.

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