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Re: MathML entities don't degrade gracefully

by Ian Hickson :: Rate this Message:

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Henri Sivonen wrote:

>
> I think the inclusion of the MathML entities in HTML5 regardless of a
> MathML context violates the Degrade Gracefully design principle of the
> HTML WG. The entities don't add anything to the expressiveness of the
> language: anything that you can express with the entities you can also
> express with numeric character references or by using UTF-8 directly.
> However, when an author uses entities that have not been traditionally
> supported by HTML, the rendering of the document in legacy user agents
> will be worse than in the situation where numeric character references
> or direct UTF-8 is used.

It will be worse, but it won't be dramatically worse.

In the transition period, people can avoid using the new entities.
However, I don't see a good reason to prevent their use in the future. If
we ever want to use new entities, we have to add them.

We've added entities before (e.g. €) without major problems.

> As for application/xhtml+xml, the situation is even worse. DTDs don't
> work on the Web[1] and are mostly useless legacy. So far, HTML 5 has
> encouraged DTDlessness for XHTML5--and rightly so. Using the MathML
> entities in XML requires a doctype, because otherwise the document would
> be ill-formed. Browsers won't fetch a DTD based on the doctype, so we
> need to consider existing magic public IDs and potential future public
> IDs. Either way, the situation will be bad from the point of view of the
> Degrade Gracefully design principle [...]

I don't think it's a critical problem if the XML authoring experience is
worse than the text/html one. After all, it's already worse for many other
reasons. What's special about this one?

The entities in HTML5 don't apply to XHTML5. The spec says as much.

--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

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