Re: Wish for MathML 3: Discourage named entities

> This is noted  in the MathML 2 spec at 6.2.1.

Also the DTD appendix says this explicitly, in its second paragraph:

    Note also that if no DTD is specified with a DOCTYPE declaration, that
    entity references (for example to refer to MathML characters by name)
    may not be used. 


> I would therefore like it to be more clear in the spec that the named  
> entities are only valid in standalone MathML document with a dtd. 

Yes. We've come to the conclusion (I think) that saying it (or saying it
again in flashing red bold text:-) won't really help. One of the
problems was that _all_ the examples used named entities and people not
unreasonably are more likely to copy examples than to read the text...
So we're currently experimenting with different formats for the
examples. The current internal draft has
<mo> &#x222B;<!--INTEGRAL--> </mo>
in examples where we previously had
<mo> &int ;</mo>

There's also work planned to address this issue in the test suite.

David

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Received on Monday, 17 September 2007 09:02:51 UTC