Re: MathML browser test page

In addition to Neil's comments,

a note on 

>  Opera fails miserably because it does not understand most named
> characters 
> (i.e that ∑ stands for Unicode character ∑ (the summation
> character))

The XML  spec allows non validating parsers to not fetch an external
DTD, and if they do not fetch it entity references such as this are a
(possibly fatal) error.

Most browsers do not fetch DTD (firefox special-cases the mathml dtd and
does not fetch the one specified, but has a smaller simpler one
pre-installed in the distribution) So while entity references are useful
for authoring,  documents are a lot more portable (in general not just for
mathml in a browser) if you expand then before serving. ie use something
like &#x2211 rather than &sum. It's a bit unfortunate but that's just
the way it is.  Opera's XML parser is entirely conformant (and not at
all untypical) in failing to expand entity references.

David


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Received on Thursday, 16 July 2009 23:58:47 UTC