Re: Cleaning House

Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:

> Boris further wrote, quote:
> There's nothing more "semantic" about superscripts/subscripts than 
> there is about italics.  For example, H<sup>1</sup> could have any 
> of the following meanings off the top of my head just in 
> mathematics: 
> 
> 1)  A number (or matrix, or whatever) H raised to the power one. 
> 2)  First cohomology (group, vector space, etc). 
> 3)  First component of a vector in differential geometry. 
> 4)  A set of first-order expansions of elements of a set H (e.g. 
> power series). 
> 5)  First graded component of the graded object H. 
> unquote
> 
> your objection proves my point (as well as the larger point that 
> most of the use cases you have outlined would be better served as 
> MathML) -- there are at least 5 valid reasons why one would use 
> superscript, and a host of others for using subscripts to indicate, 
> for example, the atoms that comprise a molocule:
> 
> <abbr title="Carbon Dioxide">CO<sub>2</sub></abbr>
> 
> what, i ask you, does the use of italics mean semantically?  as i 
> stated in another post, STRONG does not equate to B, nor EM to I; 
> these are all presentational questions, which properly belong in 
> the realm of styling, not structure.

This debate doesn't make any sense to me. <sub>, <super>, <i>, <b> are 
used to indicate a variety of things, whereas semantic HTML and MathML 
are more specific.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 13:47:13 UTC