Re: MathML browser test page

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

yes but (for any xml not just mathml) it's probably worth expanding
the page before serving it, either statically or as part of the server
configuration. Basically any XML parser will do this, so if you use say
rxp and instead of serving  foo.html you serve the output of
rxp foo.xml
then all entity references are expanded.


> It is not like the the Unicode symbols get renamed that often.

That depends how often you think is "often", every version of mathml 
(1.0, 1.1, 2, 2 2nd edition, 3, has had to re-arrange these names
to fit with additions to unicode as names that were defined to resolve
to private use characters or dubious use of asian punctuation characters
could finally be defined to use mathematical characters as these were
added to Unicode. I think now, finally, with unicode 5.1 we are in a
position to have a set that is fixed going forward, and split off into
its own standard

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/

so that MathML and other XML languages (and HTML5) can all use the same
names.

Speaking of html5, if things go acording to the current plan, the mathml
entity names will be added to the existing html entity names and
incorporated into HTML5 systems so they can be used without reference to
a DTD (for files sent as text/html). Files sent as XHTML would be parsed
by an XML parser and so would still need a DTD reference (which would as
now need to be a local subset if you wanted to ensure that it was always
read) 

David

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Received on Friday, 17 July 2009 08:23:48 UTC