Re: rendering entities

Juan,

> A couple of citations to MathML 2.0 specification

Thank you for highlighting the quotations, which confirm the points that I
just made in my reply to Stephen.

As your quotations show, you can annotate the expression with Content
MathML if you wish to make the semantics more explicit, and you can
choose the explict notation that you use by choosing appropriate
characters in the Presentation MathML. It is true that using
DifferentialD may help some systems recognise an expression, this is the
same as using <mi>tan</mi> for tangent which may be similarly more
widely recognised by software systems than other identifier names based
on other (natural) languages such as tg. It is for the author of any
given document to decide what notation (s)he wants to use, and whether
that notation is sufficiently different from some commonly understood
notation that it would be advisable to use Content MathML in addition to
the Presentation form to make the meaning clear to software systems that
may not be able to follow any textual description of the notations used.

> In my opinion to use <mo>d</mo> instead of the entity because last is not
> rendering adequately 

That isn't what is happening, the entity dd is a reference to a specific
Unicode character and that character has default rendering as a dounle
struck d. If you do not want a double struck d then you should not use
that character. See also the arabic examples for summation in
http://www.w3.org/TR/arabic-math/
In some examples a character more in keeping with the Arabic script than
the "Sigma-like" summation sign is used. Using multiple characters for
summation obviously complicates some things, but the solution is not to
tell everyone to use the same character. Solutions involve a mixture of
authors using Content Markup in addition to Presentation markup, in
order to make the meaning clear and software just learning to cope by
recognising a wider set of notational conventions. Neither is entirely
trivial to achieve, but that's life.



David

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Received on Monday, 24 April 2006 12:07:26 UTC