A quantity was written in an inline code span, as in `0.002 m^2/kg`, so
the caret was drawn literally and the span looked like code. A hundred and
ninety-five of them are now inline formulas, and with them the powers of
ten, the Greek letters, the expressions with an operator in them, and the
symbols with a subscript. Single letters went the same way, except the
three that name a classification in the format, which are data rather
than mathematics and stay monospaced.
Drawing a code block as a formula was removed rather than refined. The
guess was wrong in practice: a doc comment in the library carries a Rust
example in a fence with no language on it, and the example holds an equals
sign, so the page drew a program as a formula and reported the underscores
in its identifiers as script markers. A code block is now drawn as a code
block and nothing else, and the reader that guessed is gone, with five
hundred lines of parser and twenty-three tests that tested it.
The check on the formulas was comparing the source with itself. The source
is carried beside the MathML for a reader to copy, and both the Rust check
and the audit were reading the whole span, so a formula that lost every
number still passed. Both now take the MathML alone, and the audit counts
only the text of a leaf element, because a browser drops text that has no
element around it and counting that text made the check pass whatever the
renderer produced. With the check made real it found the program drawn as
a formula, which is what led to the guess being removed.
A formula was written as a fenced code block, which is what a plain text
file allows and is not what Markdown has for mathematics. A code block is
code: the reader of the source sees a formula presented as code, and the
renderer had been taught to guess which blocks held equations, which is a
guess that is wrong whenever a block holds something else.
Every formula now stands between dollar signs, which is the notation every
Markdown mathematics renderer reads, and the guess is gone from the
renderer. A hundred and four blocks became two hundred and four formulas
in the two languages.
Three things that were in a code block were not formulas and are now what
they are. A paragraph of geometry was prose. A table of the exponent
notation is a table, because its two columns are a written form and what
it means. Two blocks are left as they were: the layer diagram, which is a
diagram, and a sample element set, which has to keep its column alignment.
The renderer learned what the notation needs and did not have: matrix
environments, with an ampersand between the columns of a row and a double
backslash between the rows; the floor and ceiling marks; the modulo
operator; a mark above an argument, as in the time derivative of Omega and
a barred coefficient; the text command, whose argument is words and was
being set one letter at a time; and the spacing commands.
The check on the formulas covered the concept documents and not the
interface documentation, so every formula there was unexamined. It covers
both now, and it treats a command name and an environment name as
notation, which is what they are: neither is drawn as the letters of its
own name.
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