- From: William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:04:00 -0400
- To: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Cc: www-math@w3.org, dev-tech-mathml@lists.mozilla.org
David Carlisle writes: > I'm pleased to be able to announce new drafts of MathML3 and the > MathML for CSS profile. Thanks. I'm happy to see progress. I was hoping for clear guidance on prime accents in the context of presentation markup. All I see in the new spec (after searching the pdf for "prime") is 3.2.3.1: Not all 'mathematical identifiers' are represented by mi elements -- for example, subscripted or primed variables should be represented using msub or msup respectively. I raise this, in particular, because, for example, Firefox rendering of <mi>x′</mi> and <msup><mi>x</mi><mo>′</mo></msup> changed between late versions of FF2 and current FF3. (With FF2 and the first example the prime was not raised; with FF3 it is raised. With FF2 and the second example the prime was placed well; with FF3 it is too high and too small.) Also it seems now that <mi>x'</mi> is now being set upright by FF3 while <mi>x′</mi> is not. Why? Of course, these would be FF issues but for the fact that there is inadequate guidance in the spec. For example, what should be the presentation equivalent of the LaTeX: x^{\prime{}\,2} (which likely means {x'}^2 but looks better)? If some items of cdata are to be given non-standard treatment in math (and there is history in mathematical typesetting to justify it), it needs to be spelled out. Maybe a better way would be to roll out new markup such as an attribute for mo when it holds a prime accent. My point is that there is insufficient guidance in the spec. See http://math.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/primeaccents4.xhtml as well as the earlier analysis it references. -- Bill
Received on Thursday, 4 June 2009 17:04:45 UTC