Re: rangle and langle in math discouraged

Yes this is one of the "problem" cases where we can't win.
It is flagged in the documents in http://www.w3.org/2003/entities
as a problem case.

It is clear that the "right" thing to do for Unicode 3.x and above is to use the
new characters (this is also the right thing to do for W3C full unicode
normalisation as well) However it is very hard (virtually impossible) to
change the official HTML entites as html browsers don't really read the dtd
they just have the definitions hard wired in the code, and that's an
awful lot of applications running out there with those definitions.

Currently (at least) xhtml wants to stay compatible with html...

If mathml isn't compatible with xhtml then mathml fragments change
meaning if they move from a mathml document to a mathml+xhtml one which
is bad, so in (almost) all cases the mathml dtd uses html compatibility
as an overriding rule.

I suspect that the entities  in http://www.w3.org/2003/entities
which are a draft update to ISO/IEC 9573 won't take html compatibility
as a first priority (although of course it will still be an important
consideration) If an official ISO mapping can be agreed then perhaps
HTML 2 could use that, and we could revision mathml to match.

However I have no idea of the relative timescales involved here
and so for MathML2 rec today. We have the definitions as given in the
just published rec chapter 6.

David


-- 
http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk/matthew

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Received on Friday, 24 October 2003 12:36:36 UTC