Re: Profiling and certificates for MathML. Avoiding imitators

William F Hammond said:

> Secondarily, the fact that things like &invisibleTimes and
> &applyFunction would be better handled (given the non-availability of
> SDATA) as empty elements.

In the first version of the input syntax for MathML i discussed here,
stuff as entitities was represented as empty elements. Not just for MathML
but also for XHTML. E.g. &oacute; was <oacute/> and next defined via
Schema (no DTD).

Now, i see interesting go away, substituting also numeric entitities
&#nnn; as <#nnn>. Unfortunately, i do not wait that kind of change for XML
2.0.

> But I was speaking about presentation markup.

Well, i also. Justaposition for denoting times is popular for visual
rendering,  and handwritting maths.

In a visual representation, you just copy tokens and the times is mainly
redundant. But it is not for aural rendering. "4 times pi" is standard in
spoken mathematics. [4 * pi] is better than [4 pi].

Also the invisible times can be useful for automatic linebreaking.