Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

I don't recall seeing this discussed before and a quick search of the mail
archives didn't turn up anything.

The main (only?) reason that tag minimization of math tags has come up is
because of a requirement(?) for hand authoring.  However, to make hand
authoring viable, one needs to have named character entities.  It seems like
this is assumed (eg, http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Equations_in_HTML), but
this raises two questions in my mind

   1. do you really want to include the >2,000 named entities of MathML?
   2. are their any conflicts with those entities and entities defined in
   HTML5 -- I'm not aware of any, but has anyone checked?

The MathML spec specifically recommends against using named entities for
several reasons such as the need they be defined in a DTD, but they are
pretty much essential if you are going to hand author math.

Has the HTML5 WG come up with a position on including MathML's named
entities in HTML5?

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of Equation Editor, MathType, MathPlayer and MathFlow ~