Re: examples don't show that entities are deprecated

Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> writes:

> The spec says
> 	"MathML characters can also be represented via entity
>          references, although this practice is deprecated in MathML
> 2.0."
> 
> 		-- http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/chapter3.html
> 
> and yet it's full of examples that use them. Readers are going
> to pay attention to the examples at *least* as much as they
> will pay attention to that very quiet and subtle admonition.

I wonder what is the reason for deprecating "&pi;" and friends.
Surely, not concern about parser over-heating ( :-\ ).  And then
what is the difference?

Across the network the difference comes down to the question of
whether one thinks it more likely that the user lacks entity reference
lookup rather than fonts.  What is a client to do that is meaningful
for a user with "&#960;" when it has no font?   A reverse entity
reference lookup?

If one is writing a tool (or an xslt sheet) to move from an authoring
language to XHTML+MathML isn't it contrary to good programming
practice to haul out "&#960;" rather than "&pi;"?

(And I'm not going to talk about <pi/> now.  :-) )

                                      -- Bill

Received on Wednesday, 26 April 2000 09:53:26 UTC