From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Nov 02 2005 - 12:11:12 CST
From: "Guy Steele" <Guy.Steele@sun.com>
> On Nov 2, 2005, at 1:39 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> ... Incidentally, when exponentiation is to be expressed
>> compactly in plain text, then I think UPWARDS ARROW U+2191 would
>> be a better symbol than circumflex ^ (which was originally taken
>> into use in exponential expressions since it can be imagined to be
>> a simulation of an upwards arrow).
>
> Agreed. I note, however, that ASCII originally (1963) did have an
> "upwards arrow"
I did not say that my solution, using HTML markup, was ideal. It was just
addressing the case where one wants to convert HTML using <sup> into
plain-text for copy/paste operations, avoiding also the problem where some
info is lost.
It does not say that this alternative is the best, and one could as well use
other characters. The main idea is that the original text uses markup, and
using <sup> for that purpose is coherent with the choice made in ISO/IEC
10646 to not encode all superscript characters, but only a few which have
legacy uses in existing standard charsets, and their most frequent
occurences as exponent numbers (in a form that is only acceptable with
European digits, and not attested or exceptional for other localized
digits).
For this reason, there is good opportunity to allow "correct" conversion of
superscripts made with markup into sequences of plain-text characters, even
if this implies inserting other characters in the plain text. There will
still remain cases where this does not work as expected.
The trick I proposed was simple to write, easy to embed within a macro: you
can easily substitute «<sup>» by «<sup><span style="display:none">^</span>»
each time you need to write an exponent and put it into a parameteres
macro/template like «{{exp|2}}» that transforms the number 2 into a correct
exponent with all the necessary markup, the same way that you can use a
parametered macro/template to write roman digits, like «{{rom|XIII|13}}»
which would generate a correct visual representation of the Roman numeral
with a toolip explaining that the numeral represents the european number 13
(to help readers). There's lot you can do with markup languages (including
HTML, Wikimedia templates, and others...)
Of course you could use a CSS class instead of using «style="display:none"»
(but there must exist a stylesheet somewhere else, so this does not work as
a simple substitution). This does not change really the interpretation and
use of the rendered text. There's a tradeoff to find between ease of
composition, good rendering for readers, and reuse of the document for
something else (including conversions of formats).
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