in reply to RFC: Entity names for square brackets.

Q1. Is there a problem with providing a few aliases?

Q2. Are lb/rb taken? bracketl/bracketr? bra(c)kl/bra(c)kr?

Q3. if lsb/rsb then lcb/rcb for curlies? Oh yeah and how about &spc; for a space not the nbspc entity?

Q4. if we're making aliases, how 'bout using "caret" instead of "greater than" for those symbols. I'm not meaning to type a "greater than" symbol, that's just how someone made this keyboard, and I know fonts which show a tall thin caret instead of a big open wide one. so caretl,lcaret and caretr,rcaret would be nice, maybe it would even create a gif (and a little table) that is tall enough for a few lines to fit in between them.

Q5. Also I may be mistaken but I think the standard way of delimiting a phonetic pronunciation (i.e. showing an upside "e" for a schwa mark) uses tall thin square brackets. Which is not as important as maybe tall lines for drawing matrices. Maybe some of these questions are a little frivolous but I would not mind at all an end to ascii art and the ability for people to draw proper looking matrices and other mathematical symbols properly supported by gifs. You need the functionality if you want to talk about algorithms and HTML entities or not, is not enough (and MathML is too much probably).

Anyway it would be nice not to have to remember a mnemonic. I vote full words so you can easily remember the entity when you need it.

Okay, here is the question I really want to ask:

How many people cringe at the ascii art in the DBI.pm man page? Do you ever wish a module author provided a gif in the docs that could be seen on its CPAN page? Do you remember how monks used to create fabulous illustrated texts yet wake up from your revery to a pile of old ascii?
  I think it would be neat to provide a way for people to be able to draw diagrams in posts. Perhaps a graph with graphviz, or maybe just a way to upload a gif under a certain size if you are above a certain level. Or link to one on another server. Or like some wikis, a way to actually draw a vector diagram would be nice. I think it would be really great for PM, for Perl, for serious discussions, and for general enlightenment. And we could ask Damian to draw some Feynman diagrams to go along with the Quantum modules.

  • Comment on Re: RFC: Entity names for square brackets.

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Re: Re: RFC: Entity names for square brackets.
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jul 20, 2002 at 19:39 UTC

    Cough*MathXML*Cough. Requires browser support, but is a much cleaner way to go.

    Also, there's no need for HTML-escapes for {}; they aren't metachars in Everything. [ and ] are only needed because they're metachars in Everything-text and not HTML. HTML should provide HTML-escapes for everything else that can't be typed directly on a standard US 101-key QUERTY -- if not, it's not considered common enough.

    In other words, it isn't Everything's job to make up for (percived) problems in HTML that it didn't cause.

    Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.

[reply]
      Natch, you're right. Though I don't carry an entity table in my head (for a current project I am wondering how for example to display, and better yet input, an Old English "OE" character used in a wine product name). So I still would like a curly entity so I don't have to carry that extra info in my head.. oops too late.

      To follow up, HTML can do images, how come PM (/ Everything?) can't I wonder. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words may be true if we use compressed formats.

[reply]

        It's generaly easy to find HTML entity names; do a google search for HTML entity OE or suchlike. (You don't even have to clickthrough for this one; Œ is Œ, as you can see reading the snippet of the first hit.) (BTW, for input you should support UTF-8 chars 338 and 339 (AKA /\x{152}/i), as well as /oe/i. The info on codepoints is in that same table, if you remember that the &#nnn; syntax uses decimal nnn.

        Oh, and PM/Everything can pass-through any tag it's told to; it's being told not to passthrough <img> tags. I rather wonder why. I suppose there is a worry people will put <img> tags pointing to porn or other things undeseriable here. (On homenodes, it will allow them IFF the users's level supports homenode images, IIRC.)

        Update: I almost forgot: when do you need an entity for curlies? They aren't metachars in HTML nor Everything.

        Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.

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