The prime accents
Reference:
BugZilla # 140439 originally reported by Torsten Bronger on
26 April 2002.
Conclusions:
- Firefox 1.5.0.9 treats ′ (′)
differently from ″ (″) both
in Linux and in Windows XP.
- The treatment of ′ can probably be improved by making it
parallel to the treatment of ″.
- In some cases the use of the CSS vertical-align property
is an acceptable workaround for Mozilla's handling of ′
as a postfix operator.
Various symbols marked up only with mi here:
.
In connection with these examples, note that it is both Mozilla
behavior and the long-standing TeX custom that a math symbol denoted
with more than one alphabetical character is rendered upright (and,
therefore, as if in the HTML namespace).
Below here prime and double-prime accents are handled either using
<msup> or using the CSS
vertical-align property with value “super”
along with the attribute specification
form="postfix" in postfix operator markup on single prime
(but not on double prime) accents.
This and this use ′ and ″ as postfix operators,
while <msup> is used here:
and .
These are display mode:
These are in 1×1 mtables in displaymath:
In some user agents there are font problems when U-2032 and U-2033 are
used directly rather than by entity reference.
Tangential Comments:
- The entity name Prime is not parallel to the other
similarly-purposed entity names (tprime and qprime,
as well as prime). It would be good to make dprime
a duplicate entity name for Prime.
- The second paragraph of section 3.2.3.1 in the MathML specification needs work. While
it makes sense to special case various items of CDATA in presentation
operators (mo), it may or may not make sense in presentation
symbol indicators (mi). If it makes sense, then it
should be laid out more systematically.