The mapping of phi (was: Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML)

On Mar 30, 2008, at 07:52, Neil Soiffer wrote:
> 	• do you really want to include the >2,000 named entities of MathML?
> 	• are their any conflicts with those entities and entities defined  
> in HTML5 -- I'm not aware of any, but has anyone checked?

As it stands, a piece of HTML or XHTML source code with φ in it  
changes meaning when it is moved to a document with a MathML public id  
in the doctype or vice versa. Is this the kind of badness that is hit  
with such a low probability that fixing it would do more harm than  
letting it be? (People should be using straight UTF-8 instead of  
entities anyway.) Or is this something that needs fixing? (How?)

  * Mozilla's DTD catalog for XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 maps φ to U 
+03C6 per spec.[1]
  * HTML5 (text/html) maps φ to U+03C6.[2]
  * Mozilla has updated its DTD catalog for "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1  
plus MathML 2.0//EN", "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG  
1.1//EN" and "-//W3C//DTD MathML 2.0//EN" in a way that resolved φ  
to U+03D5.[3][4]
  * The XML Entity definitions for Characters spec maps φ to U 
+03D5.[5][6]
  * The reason for changing what φ means is explained in [7] and  
[8].
  * No one knows if there are JavaScript scripts or CSS selectors out  
there that expect φ to expand to U+03C6.
  * In my personal opinion[14], the list of browser-recognized public  
ids should never again be expanded, in which case XML Entity  
definitions for Characters would not be Web-relevant (except as an  
update to what the MathML 2.0 public ids refer to). [9][10]
  * Making browsers fetch and parse the actual DTDs is not feasible.  
[11][12]
  * It seems that this is a real author problem. [13]

[1] http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/content/xml/content/src/xhtml11.dtd
[2] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#entities
[3] http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/layout/mathml/content/src/mathml.dtd
[4] http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/parser/htmlparser/src/nsExpatDriver.cpp#288
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/isogrk1.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/isogrk3.html
[7] http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/
[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289938#c21
[9] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289938#c16
[10] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289938#c20
[11] http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic
[12] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/no-dtd/
[13] http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.mathml/browse_thread/thread/0afaf64eb1b1eab3/d0f26a348c95d4b8
[14] http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.xml/browse_thread/thread/e7f7efbb5e161348/9fde74f46fb0b5d2

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/



-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Sunday, 30 March 2008 09:15:34 UTC