[whatwg] Mathematics in HTML5

[White Lynx]

Michel Fortin wrote:

> I know that. But special parsing rules, just as new CSS properties,  
> need changes to happen in the browser. If someone is going to improve  
> the browser, it'd be much better to improve the presentational layer  
> with a few reusable CSS rules than to add a collection of specific- 
> case parser rules changing the DOM for presentational reasons.

Probably it is better to improve presentational layer, but what we have today 
took about ten years, waiting ten years more until CSS will be improved 
to address math needs and implemented in browsers is too much.

>>> I'd also add that better support for combining diacritics in
>>> Unicode,  designed to stack over each other, would be great for
>>> maths too.
>>
>> They already are expected to stack over each other.

> And that's why I was asking for better support, not design

Yes support for combining diacritical marks would be nice.


> 2. This isn't going to work correctly when the subscripts and  
> > superscripts are complex (e.g. fractions). In your proposal,  
> > they'll fail to stack and will go one after another. What should  
> > happen is that they should still be one above another, just  
> > occupying more vertical space.
> 
> You're right, that's a pretty valid criticism that I haven't thought  
> about. But if I bring back my third point suggesting new values for  
> "vertical-align" based on the preceding character's or element's  
> height, we could arrange the meaning of such values as to make  
> vertical overlap impossible.

Adding CSS extensions makes sense, but I fear it could take infinite time,
therefore it is better to keep markup within XML/CSS2.1 framework so we could
start using it today and then gradually improve situations on CSS side.


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