Mathematical equations in HTML/CSS - css

This has been promoted from personal to scientific. It used to be called Disgustin', and that was changed after things began working a little better. Now, things are worse again, and if you don't see three Greek characters in the title, you may wish to consult this.

This is not a translater of any kind: instead it is a CSS stylesheet and a number of helpers that contain formatted material that can be copied, pasted and modified. They are in

Descriptions of the helpers will follow this DISCLAIMER:
No doubt, some who peruse these pages will be disappointed by equations they think to look like junk. That might be partly their fault, partly mine, and definitely the fault of some others. I can be pretty fussy about how my equations look too, and I have learned to limit my expectations. So my advice to all of us who aspire to put equations on webpages is: if you are really fussy about equations, use real math typesetters, and paste bitmapped images of their output into the documents (some hints). As for the others, let it rest with the observation that making it easy to display math in html-documents has never been a high-priority item on the browser-industry agenda.

• styles contains all the info that is needed to use
  
  
  <tag id=idn class=cls style= - - - > - - - </tag>
  
  for various formatting tasks, from font selection to NEWS-moves. The intent here is to make things easier to do, and one of the devices (gypsy css) is to steal a few of the html tags that mathematicians seldom use. In particular, <s> (strike-through), shamelessly stolen from the lawyers, has been put to use as the tag that changes the font to the symbol font. The tag, <u> (underline), has been put to use as a tag whose only property is the css directive, (style=)position:relative.
  
  
• alphas has the usual selection of Greek letters, their LaTeX-names and their formulas, e.g. <s>a</s> for a. Except for e, which isn't \epsilon, and Î, which isn't either, the rendering of Greek letters is fairly good.
  
  
• symbols has a selection of other symbols from the symbol font, which is symbolps (if available) or symbol. For most of the symbols the font weight is too light, relative to alphanumeric characters, and there doesn't appear to be much that can be done about that.
  
  
• braces has formulas for small, medium and large integral signs and braces. It really is a lot easier to paste the formula into a document than it is to do a large left paren by typing
  æ
  ç
  è
  
  
  <s id=z18>&#230;<br>&#231;<br>&#232;</s>
  For these, the lightweight symbols can be beefed up by using a larger font-size, but the result of that <s id=z18> is definitely browser dependent.
  
  
• eq-types is basically a theme I didn't write and variations. Using tables to construct displayed equations (as opposed to inline formulas) seems to be the easiest approach. An idea that came from mathrec.org was very helpful.
  
  
• elements are the pieces that can be substituted in various types of equations - a hodgepodge, always under construction. My intent is to include copies of a variety of things that come up in other contexts.
  
  
• marks are diacritical marks; there aren't enough of them, and they don't work well on old browsers. One of the most irritating of Netscape 4 bugs is its vertical misalignment of characters from different fonts. In addition to problems with marks, there are problems with expressions that contain both Greek and Latin characters - you know, really arcane stuff like A=pr2.
  
  
• waves is an example with more equations than blather. I can attest to the fact that getting them to look decent on Netscape 4 and Explorer 5 at the same time, was not easy!