RE: MathML browser test page

Hello David,

I am sure that Opera is entirely conformal with the all the specs.

The problem is that it difficult to write any MATHML without
using the named characters (expanded entity references).  

∭ is a triple integral     
∑ is a sum

Trying to do this with the just the numbers is like 
trying to surf the internet using only the IP numbers
of the web-sites.  DNS exists because humans like using easy to remember
names.  It is easy to remember 'google.com' but hard 
to remember '64.233.167.99'.

I hope you can see how I was confused as to the correctness of
Opera's implementation of MathML when it failed to correctly
display a page that passed validation as "XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0" 
and passed validation as CSS level 2.1 .

The Opera developers do not HAVE to use the named version of 
the Unicode symbols, but it would GREATLY help if they did.

It is not like the the Unicode symbols get renamed that often.
It would appear to be a ONE TIME expense of a couple of hours
to add the needed character names.  But that is just my
opinion.  Opera is an awesome browser, but until they 
include the use of named characters, I am not going to see 
how awesome the browser is in displaying MathML.

    Joe







   -------- Original Message --------
 Subject: Re: MathML browser test page
 From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
 Date: Thu, July 16, 2009 4:58 pm
 To: joe.java@eyeasme.com, www-math@w3.org
 
 
 In addition to Neil's comments,
 
 a note on 
 
 > Opera fails miserably because it does not understand most named
 > characters 
 > (i.e that &Sum; stands for Unicode character &#8721; (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 Friday, 17 July 2009 02:48:34 UTC