Glad this helped. You may want to check out The ASP.net CSS Adapters project as well. These adapters completely remove the iframe and table markup that the stock ASP.net Menu control renders.

I have been trying to figure out what was going on the ASP:MENU control for almost a day.

There is no formal microformat specification for telephone numbers at this date. For extensions, I feel that this format below is the most readable and economical:

(206) 850-9798 ext 201

(325) 677-1444, ext 8074

Is there supposed to be a comma in this or not?
Gayla

Great comments. I’m glad to get the conversation started here. I’d love to hear from others, particularly around the pure aesthetic appreciation of the different formats. My heart and mind still lies with (206) 850-9798 : )

- Kevin

To me the use of dots adheres to the minimalist approach of getting the information to someone without visual clutter. The dot creates a negative spacing between the clustered numbers and the numbers themselves help in the pairing and easy memorization of a phone number as they clearly present themselves without any other graphic distractions.

With the parentheses method, a person with poor writing skills (aka most doctors), can draw a () that can easily be mistaken for a 1, 2, 4, 7, maybe 9, C, I, L…you get the point. The dot on the otherhand, is an element that is down below, out of the way and can not be mistaken for a number or anything else.

I agree that the parentheses have an somewhat beautiful look, but it is distracting from what I need to know and retain. I find the numbers themslves much sexier than having to add an elegant element to compete/distract. And isn’t the - a harsh looking element.

In todays world of homogization and globalization, is knowing someones locality such great importance? Not really when conducting business, but when wanting to get together with friends who move to Arizona, yes!!

*this posting would not have been made possible without the use of parentheses.

Thank you for the info.

I can not get the triangles you recommended to render in IE6 (they appear as empty boxes or not at all). The “right triangle” works in IE7 but not IE6. The left triangle does not work in IE6 or IE7.

Below are sample pages that can be viewed in IE6 and IE7 with two different encodings:

• UTF8 ecnoding
• ISO encoding

Let me know if I’m getting the codes wrong. It’d be great to know if the triangles are somehow feasible in IE6.

- Kevin

FYI i guess?

Thanks alot!

I’m not aware of numeric equivalents for ←, ↑, etc. I don’t have JAWS or another screen reader installed at the moment, but when I use Mac OSX’s text-to-voice ← is pronounced “andlar” (not ideal!).

My guess is that JAWS would read ← as “left arrow” but I have no way to confirm this at the moment.

For example, instead of using ← use & # 9999 ;

For example, instead of using ←, use ✏ Do you know if these have numerical equivalents?

As far as the thick arrows - THANKS! I have never seen them before, thats good to know, they could definitely come in handy.

Below are the HTML equivalents for the thin HTML arrows and the thicker HTML triangle characters that can be used as arrows in some cases. Sometimes the thick triangle HTML arrows work better to denote drop down fields, etc.. Hope this helps : )

← ←

↑ ↑

→ →

↓ ↓

↔ ↔

↕ ↕

▲ ▲

► ► (will not render correctly in IE6)

▼ ▼

◄ ◄ (will not render correctly in IE6)