As long as you serve the documents as some xml mime type, you can (using Mozilla at least), use an entity defined in the doctype to store the markup for the TeX logo and insert it as required. At least that worked when I tried it (FWIW my test page is at http://zeus.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~jg307/mozilla/TeX.xml). Of course that doesn't help here, since it would require the page to use a different doctype and be served with the appropriate mime type (my assertations being based on the behaviour of Mozilla rather than on any actual knowledge of the specifcations, so feel free to correct me). It would probably also break the page horribly in some other browsers.
The point is that the technology exists to do a lot of cool things, but they are underused. The problem is that UA implementations often suck, and the web being what it is requires ~100% backwards compatibility from all new documents, whereas documents for local use don't suffer this restriction.
Posted by jgraham at May 8, 2003 2:39 PMAh, true. I could do that; I had not thought of it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that would leave the document valid XHTML, and as you note as long as IE does not understand XML it the whole point is theoretical.... :(
Posted by Boris at May 9, 2003 1:24 AMHow about <span style="letter-spacing: -.2em;">T</span> for creating the kerning?
Posted by Tim at May 15, 2003 3:29 PMSince there is only one letter in the , I would expect that to do absolutely nothing (since letter-spacing is applied _between_ letters, implementations bugs in Mozilla notwithstanding). I suppose I could wrap both the T and the E in the span, though...
Posted by Boris at May 15, 2003 3:36 PMIf you were a purist and didn't want the style="" attribute in your markup, you could always use XBL to generate it... ;)
Posted by Ben Smedberg at May 22, 2003 2:30 PMBeen there... The content management system of Macsanomat supports automatic span+CSS spesentation of TeX and LaTeX. That is, the author of the entry only writes “TeX” or “LaTeX” and the spans are added to the HTML output.
For example: http://www.macsanomat.com/nayta.php?id=451
Posted by Henri Sivonen at July 9, 2003 8:32 AMYeah... the letter-spacing they end up using makes the 'X' pretty much overlap the 'E', which looks terrible. :(
Posted by Boris at July 9, 2003 1:01 PM