Re: ϖ in xhtml-symbol.ent

"Sean M. Burke" <sburke@cpan.org> writes:

> At 11:33 2002-07-16 +0900, Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:
> >"Sean M. Burke" <sburke@cpan.org> wrote:
> > > >It's the Unicode name for U+03D6.  Describing each character's usage
> > > >inside comment is probably out of scope for an XHTML specification.
> > >
> > > Yes, but the Unicode names are usually useful.  Here it's actually
> > > misleading, so it really does require further elaboration -- notions of
> > > "scope" aside.
> >
> >And I don't think comment inside an XHTML specification is the right
> >place to do so.
> 
> 1) It wouldn't hurt.
> 2) What do you suggest instead/besides?

It should be -- and is -- documented in the W3 MathML project.

I find the ff. lines in my copy of the combined XHTML-MathML DTD:

<!ENTITY varepsilon       "&#x0025B;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 epsiv -->
<!ENTITY varkappa         "&#x003F0;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 kappav -->
<!ENTITY varphi           "&#x003D5;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 phiv -->
<!ENTITY varpi            "&#x003D6;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 piv -->
<!ENTITY varrho           "&#x003F1;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 rhov -->
<!ENTITY varsigma         "&#x003C2;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 sigmav -->
<!ENTITY vartheta         "&#x003D1;" ><!--alias ISOGRK3 thetav -->

The var names are familiar to mathematicians who use TeX.

It's important to remember with XML that such character entity names
are converted to the corresponding code points in parsing -- assuming
that the parser chooses to look for their definitions.  So your style
sheet or filter will never see the names.

Because the parser may not look for the definitions (some important
user agents appear not to look), robust web-served XML should have the
code points instead of the names.

                                    -- Bill

Received on Monday, 15 July 2002 23:58:07 UTC