Re: Attn: Tom Dickey Re: lynx-dev superscript bugs

[Steve White]

Regarding the posting by David Woolley <address@hidden>
Sat, 10 Aug 2002 12:41:06 +0100 (BST)

You will find in the documentation for HTML 4 SGML entities
        <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html>
under section 24.3 the following comment.

        "When to use Greek entities. This entity set contains all the
        letters used in modern Greek. However, it does not include Greek
        punctuation, precomposed accented characters nor the non-spacing
        accents (tonos, dialytika) required to compose them. There are no
        archaic letters, Coptic-unique letters, or precomposed letters for
        Polytonic Greek. The entities defined here are not intended for
        the representation of modern Greek text and would not be an
        efficient representation; rather, they are intended for occasional
        Greek letters used in technical and mathematical works."

The correct way to represent Greek in text is to specify a character 
encoding, such as iso-8859-7 or UTF-8, which supports the Greek
alphabet entirely.

You will find that Lynx tranliterates characters from iso-8859-7 when 
used on a terminal that doesn't support this character set.
See my page <http://www.zipcon.net/~swhite/docs/computers/browsers/greek.html>

>
>There are two different uses of Greek characters:
>
>- mathematics;
>- correct spelling of Greek words.
>
>Lynx doesn't support MathML, so most cases with maths that it can half
>handle are likely to also contains GIFs of formulae.  As such, I don't think
>the maths case can be all that strong.
>

Your argument strikes me as being very inverted.  

Because Lynx doesn't support MathML (yet), it shouldn't support the 
representation of simple math formulae that can be represented in HTML?  
Did you really mean to say that?

I personally detest using Gif's to represent formulae.  It's ugly, sloppy,
and amounts to a loss of information.

I have found that a lot of math can be represented very well in HTML,
so long as browsers adhere to published standards.



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