[whatwg] Mathematics in HTML5

Michel Fortin wrote:
> But isn't this presentational instead of structural? Why not use
> 
>      <fence class="parenthesis">...</fence>
> 
> with the proper CSS for presentation? 

But fence is used not only for brackets, it may appear in other constructions like |absolute value|, ||norm||.

> I suppose one reason may lie in  
> the non-obviousness of implementing different kinds of fences styles  
> in CSS.

Another reason is that different bracket styles usually have different meanings, so this is sensitive 
information and transfering this kind of information to presentational layer makes it difficult to recover. 
In particular this may affect functionality of HTML-Math to LaTeX or HTML-Math to MathML convertors,
that are likely to be based on structural markup without paying any attention to what styling is actually
specified in style sheets.

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Received on Saturday, 10 June 2006 02:18:18 UTC