No MathML in webkit
So apparently WebKit has no real MathML support. Empirically, it seems like you get some stuff like greek symbols, but things like sums and whatnot don’t appear. Oh well. Mac users, switch to Firefox, or ignore the math posts.
Old comments are in
I’ve finally pulled in all the old comments from the Blogspot blog. A painful process of semi-automated Atom to YAML+Textile conversion, and the resulting comments are not threaded, but they’re at least here now.
As a side note, I’m really liking having my posts stored in a git repo. I can write them locally, tweak them and see how things look, and push when they’re finally ready to be published.
As another side note, MathML is a being a shitshow as usual. Firefox 3.1 (but not 3.0?) apparently craps out at embedded style sheets in XML (craps out as in, refuses to display the blog and displays a big red error instead), or some shit. So I’ve removed some stylesheet line from the master template and now everything seems to work in both Firefoxes. But that line is critical according to Putting mathematics on the Web with MathML so god only knows what I’ve broken in the process.
The big problem with all this MathML stuff is that the XML wonks apparently managed to trick everyone into violating Postel’s law and failing hard when the browser doesn’t like something about the XML it sees. So the moment anything is slightly out of whack, no one can see your blog. Maybe that’s why no one in the world uses MathML except for me?
That brings to mind an old Mark Pilgrim post about XML and Postel’s Law which is a good read, and includes this memorable quote:
Various people have tried to mandate this principle out of existence, some going so far as to claim that Postel’s Law should not apply to XML, because (apparently) the three letters “X”, “M”, and “L” are a magical combination that signal a glorious revolution that somehow overturns the fundamental principles of interoperability.
Good stuff. Too bad that was five fucking years ago and I’m still dealing with this shit.
maff test
It really seems like this should display some kind of equation:
I can’t make it work despite all my xhtml’ing. Blogger fail. [Fixed in Whisper. —ed.]