Unicode 6:XML Entities draft

Unicode 6.0 was published last month, and the proposals for Unicode 6.1 are firming up, both of these releases have significant new characters for mathematical use, so I have updated the Editors' draft of “XML Entity Definitions for Characters ”.

The main source file, unicode.xml has been updated to contain information for all characters in Unicode 6.0, and the provisional allocations for the Arabic Math Alphabets in Unicode 6.1. There is no change to the set of entity names or the MathML or HTML dtd derived from these sources.

Although this document is styled as an editors' draft for an update to the current recommendation, there are no immediate plans to publish a formal update to the W3C recommendation. However I hope to track changes to Unicode in this editors' draft, and perhaps once the proposals to add Arabic mathematical characters to Unicode are all processed, we may try to submit this for formal review as a Proposed Edited Recommendation.

Unicode 6.0

Most of the new characters in Unicode 6.0 are not directly related to Mathematics, although the large collection of “emoji” derived from characters used in the Japanese mobile phone industry provides some interesting characters that I'm sure could be used for mathematical operators (U+1F4A9 perhaps?). However there are some specifically mathematical characters including new heavy (ultra bold) plus and minus (U+2795 and U+2796) which may find use either in display contexts or as additional operators distinct from the usual plus and minus.

Unicode 6.1 (proposals)

The mathematical alphabets (bold, fraktur, double-struck, etc. ) that are in Unicode, and available as values in MathML 2's mathvariant attribute fit well with the mathematical traditions using the Roman and Greek alphabets but don't really work with other alphabets, notably Arabic.

Azzeddine Lazrek proposed that MathML and Unicode be extended with additional math alphabets corresponding to conventions used in Arabic typeset Mathematics. (initial, tailed, looped, stretched) these were added to MathML in the recently finalised MathML 3,0, and the corresponding code points have been allocated to Unicode (all in the block 1EE??) and planned to be standardised in Unicode 6.1. I have provisionally added this data to unicode.xml, and added a table showing the characters to the entities draft.

XML Entity Definitions for Characters

The W3C today published XML Entity Definitions for Characters as a Recommendation (i.e., Web standard). It's taken a long time (over a decade) but I hope you find them useful...

XML Entities: W3C Vote

As noted in a previous post, XML Entity Definitions for Characters is now a Proposed Recommendation.

To help the W3C make the decision to make the final transition to Recommendation status the Advisory Committee members are asked to submit comments. If you are in a W3C member company, please ask your AC representative to comment via the form
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/PR-xml-entity-names-20100211/
by the 11th of March!

Entities: Proposed Recommendation

I'm pleased to be able to report that today the W3C has published
XML Entity Definitions for Characters
as a Proposed Recommendation.

It's only really a list of names and numbers, but it seems to have taken up a large chunk of my life since I accidentally fell into supporting these things.

XML Entity Definitions for Characters

I'm pleased to announce that the last call draft of XML Entity Definitions for Characters has been published:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-xml-entity-names-20091117/

Comments are welcome on www-math@w3.org, please put the text
[last-call...
in the subject line, preferably like this:
[Entities-last-call] - summary of comment

Three new W3C Working Drafts

Today the W3C published three new working drafts

MathML3 Several new features worked on this time, more Content MathML improvements, more information on layouts for elementary mathematics (long division, etc.), and the first draft of a Relax NG Schema. Also, we have re-instated the XHTML+MathML version of the spec.

A MathML for CSS profile I'm down as co-editor of this, but all the main credit should go to George Chavchanidze of Opera Software, who's continuing his long standing work of getting mathematical rendering using pure CSS declarations.

XML Entity definitions for Characters The latest iteration of the the definitions of Characters. This was formerly part of the MathML spec (Chapter 6) but had been separated out and extended to include all the ISO entity sets, and the HTML Entity sets. I still hope that eventually this can be a joint ISO/W3C publication, updating ISO/IEC TR 9773-13. We'll see...

XML Entity definitions for Characters

In many contexts people find it convenient to enter characters that are not on the keyboard as entity references, such as &rightarrow; to get an arrow rather than remembering what keyboard shortcut or numeric reference (&#x2192;) would produce this. In many cases, life would be simpler if people did not do this: having entity references means that not only do you need a <!DOCTYPE declaration to reference a DTD that defines the entities, you need your XML parser to read the DTD, and it makes processing fragments of XML much harder, as either the fragments do not have a <!DOCTYPE (in which case they are not, themselves, well formed) and the fragment pasting operation needs to ensure that a suitable DTD reference is placed on the target document, or the fragments do have a doctype, and the fragment pasting needs to strip this off, and still ensure that the target document has a compatible DTD.

If fragments are being moved from one place to another this can be difficult. Consider moving a fragent of MathML from an XHTML document to Docbook for example. XHTML and Docbook define entities with in several case the same name but different definition (the original ISO definitions of the entity names did not give definitions in terms of Unicode characters) and older versions of Unicode did not have sufficient technical symbols to give sensible definitions for most of these names.

All of which preamble is just leading up to say Unicode 5.1 (Beta) does have suitable characters for all the ISO and MathML entities..

The Entity draft at http://www.w3.org/2003/entities has thus been updated to a new "2007" version, which we (the W3C Math WG) hope to submit to W3C as a new Recommendation track document shortly, but you can view my Editor's Draft here.

MathML3 will hopefully use these by reference, if (X)HTML (and possibly other non-W3C systems such as Docbook) could do the same, then hopefully we would finally have a set of entity names with widespread consistent use across multiple languages. Hopefully.

Over the years I've been maintaining these sets we've kept fairly regular contact with the STIX group and the tables of characters in the above document include characters typeset with the STIX Fonts (if you have them installed, and they work in your browser. (The plane 1 characters still fail for me in all browsers on windows).

Comments are welcome, either in this blog, or better on www-math@w3.org.