Why is the "<" symbol named the "less-than sign"?

[philip chastney]

 there was a consultancy -- Accenture, I think -- who put a "greater-than" mark above one of the characters in their name

I struck me as odd that they should mark their name with a diminuendo

lack of ambition, perhaps?   . . .   /phil


    On Wednesday, 16 September 2020, 18:11:59 GMT, James Tauber via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:  
 
 On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:17 PM John W Kennedy via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:


: was changed to <, e (for “end”) was changed to /, and . was changed to >. The characters used, of course, had to be available in ASCII. I dare say early publications on SGML include a rationale. 

Had to be available in ASCII, less likely to occur in character content, and the < > pair visually suggests the open/close of markup (and alludes to the older written convention of circling markup to distinguish it from content).
James
  
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