Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27104094-20171125215702/@comment-31763506-20180104022155

Well, I've already gone through and replaced all the instances of <, >, >=, <= and the Unicode ≥ and ≤ in the Yhilin battle guide, the army page and the investments page with the alphanumeric HTML entities, and was going to do the same for the 3rd Arclent War guide later this evening, so if the guideline is to use the basic characters, I need to stop and undo that change.

I'd argue very strongly in favor of making a guideline in favor of the entities for all the above characters based on w3c guideline I linked above, because leaving stray tag delimiting characters in a SGML markup language is asking for trouble. We control the source of our pages, but there's no guarantee that the dev team for the Wikia parser is going to handle them consistently or gracefully in the future. The note about guillemot entities in Patreon comments wasn't just my ADHD, I was citing an example of loose tag characters causing bizarre and undesirable results that I think all of us are familiar with.

For clarity, it's been about ten years since I worked as an HTML editor and then web developer, before moving on to more or less full time work as a SQL wrangler. When I stepped away from web presentation layers Unicode adoption was still nowhere near universal, and it's still fairly strongly frowned upon in both SQL code and database storage, owing to portability and the fact that in large US and UK production databases it's effectively pissing away hard disk space and RAM (and consequently money). So Unicode support in my choice of text editors has not been a consideration until just now.

The dwarf ambassador question is an easy one though. Just walk up to his location in the Aram Desert in Ch. 4 and he'll be there with a note from SL on talking to him: "Expect this guy to offer something interesting... in version 0.32.0." This doesn't seem to be dependent on whether you invested in Megail's path though, so that note may be out of place for now.