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Re: Seeking Special Character (>ascii 127) support matrix for browsers -- PLEASE!
The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.text.sgml,comp.text.xml as well.
"Brien Tate" <btate@cahners.com> writes:
> I am seeking out reference documents which show the browsers and teh format
> in which they support a spceial character. An example of this would be
> whether or not I.E. 5.0 supports the Unicode definition of the @ sign, or
> pi, or beta, or mu, etc......
. . .
> As broad a reference as
> possible would help as the development environment requires XML code to be
> parsed for various final uses, including searching for those same special
> characters in a large scale archive.
IMHO, if you are preparing XML *source* documents for various final
forms (not just handling by IE or NS), you might want to give serious
thought to handling characters such as "pi" as empty elements, e.g.,
"<pi/>". You would not then put "<pi/>" into a document that is
directly on the web. Instead you would pre-process the source
document into a web document.
Unicode makes sense only when one believes that it is usable in
*every* final form. For example, I consider Texinfo, the language of
the GNU Documentation System, -- an older hypertext language than HTML
-- a useful alternative final source. That is, if I am going to the
trouble to create an XML source document, then I want to have the
option of processing that document to Texinfo. (Let's ignore for now
the fact that (still) only the print side of Texinfo supports
"<pi/>".)
A mathematician might want to have, instead of just "<pi/>":
1. <pi/> -- a char in the Greek alphabet, not a symbol (#960).
2. <piu/> -- the universal mathematical constant (#982).
3. <piv/> -- a miscellaneous mathematical variable (#982).
4. <pio/> -- a miscellaneous mathematical function (#982).
The mathematical distinctions do not exist in unicode. These
distinctions, possibly more, are significant for
1. translation into XHTML with MathML.
2. smart searching.
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William F. Hammond Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics
518-442-4625 The University at Albany
hammond@math.albany.edu Albany, NY 12222 (U.S.A.)
http://math.albany.edu:8000/~hammond/ Dept. FAX: 518-442-4731
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