Re: comments on MathML last call

  First, you say "There are currently few if any applications that
  can use these characters". What applications are you speaking
  about? Both IE and nsgmls have been fixed, and these are the
  only applications with these problems that we are aware of.

They were the two better known applications that would fail to parse
the mathml dtd but most end users probably have a higher level of
expectation for these characters than that they survive parsing.

I don't know of any currently freely available fonts that are set
up with tables so that characters in these positions render as
specified. People sometimes quote the code2001 project but 
http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm
still says of mathematics:

   In this version, the special letter forms for Mathematics are (still)
   not completed, and many of them are wrong, rough, or inappropriate.


  Second, I just had a look at
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-MathML2-20030411/isoamsa.html.
  Some of the glyphs come with boxes around them, and for some
  others, there is just a gray box. I'm not sure there is
  a need anymore to distinguish different classes of characters.


The grey box is "none.png" which is a link the stylesheet creates
if a better character image isn't supplied. I hope to generate some
more images now the actual code assignments are stable, once we've
finished handling last call comments to the text of the spec.
Similarly the images with boxes are older images from the mathml-1 spec
that just have a border within the image. Hopefully we'll be able to
regenerate those as well sometime, but they are lower priority than the
images that are missing.

David

________________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star Internet. The
service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive
anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit:
http://www.star.net.uk
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Monday, 2 June 2003 06:17:09 UTC