From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Fri Apr 21 2006 - 12:02:07 CST
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> On 4/20/2006 8:56 AM, Rick McGowan wrote:
>>> Why is there a special Unicode character U+210E for it?
>>
>> The short answer: because it was required many years ago for round-trip
>> mapping to another standard.
>> Rick
>>
> And therefore precedes the complete coverage needed for MathML and other
> uses, which made attributing a specific name to the character a liability -
> but character names just don't change.
Why was (any) coverage needed _for MathML_? I can see the point in using
mathematical italics letters and similar symbols _in plain text_, but
isn't MathML supposed to be a mathematical _markup_ language?
It might be more convenient, especially from the authoring point of view,
to write the symbols simply as characters with code points of their own.
But in a markup language, one _could_ also use markup for the same
purpose, say, using <mi>h</mi> to denote mathematical italics "h".
There's a potential future problem. Mathematicians keep inventing new
symbols as they need them, using, say, Latin or Greek letters in some
particular style (say, bold italic underlined and overlined - there are
infinite possibilities). Will they all be encoded in Unicode?
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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