Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: math symbols etc in HTML +- compatibility



I created a table to show how serious are the problems
with math symbols. I know it's a bit late for Halloween,
but if you want to see something scary, view the
following with MSIE:

http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/font-table.htm#sym

Characters encoded in the symbol font are shown in red,
side-by-side with the corresponding HTML entity shown
in black. In theory these should be the same, in any
browser that implements the symbol font at all, but
if you view that page using MSIE you will discover that
in many cases MSIE refuses to render the HTML code
correctly.

This is a horrific source of incompatibilities.

It really doesn't do you much good to know the HTML
entities if MSIE isn't going to render them correctly.


* HTML codes that are not rendered at all include
many math symbols such as gradient, for-all, there-exists,
proportional-to, includes-as-member, alef, imaginary-part,
real-part, power-set, otimes, oplus, null-set, cup, cap,
subset, subset-or-equal, not-subset, superset, superset-or-equal,
member-of, not-member-of, angle, logical-and, logical-or,
right and left angle brackets, and most of the pieces for
building large operators and large punctuation.
* In addition, some of the HTML entity codes for
Greek letters are rendered incorrectly. The HTML for phi
(with ascender and descender) is rendered with descender
only. Look at the page using a standards-compliant
(non-Microsoft) browser if you want to see what these
entities are supposed to look like.
* The HTML code for variant phi (with descender only)
is not rendered at all. The HTML codes for variant theta,
variant pi, and variant Upsilon are not rendered at all.

For a fuller discussion, including partial workarounds,
see
http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/encoding.htm