Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>Barry might have been thinking of the [_] and [_{digits}] markup tags.
>
>

Nope, I was thinking of what we were talking about.

I suppose some html tags can be thought of in the future as having lost
their presentational abilities. This might be one of them.

E.g. technically speaking, tables would be verboten too, but it is
usually easier to use the table tags then a tone of <div> tags, and it
could be more readable with tables too,

But only if you then rely 100% on CSS to do the formatting, which you
could do with subscripts and superscripts (with any tags you like I
guess). But my point was that if you do use those tags that way in the
future, expecting the browser to just render them as anything other then
plaintext absent any CSS would be deprecated. Guess that was less then
100% clear, but it is sufficiently off topic that I won't go into it
further.. there are ample discussions of CSS issues on the web, one
literate one is alistapart.com.

>However, I think they are a lot less intrusive than <sub>, etc. They also
>are a lot easier to type! I'm not looking to create text that can be
>processed or rendered (beyond text-only capability), only trying to find
>the most concise way to avoid near-barbarisims such as "H2O". (I'm an old
>coot/fogy, and have seen properly subscripted chemical formulae all my
>life. I also, in general, dislike ambiguity.
>
>

Actually, I just remembered that I once worked on a drawing program that
rendered all types of chemical formulas and molecules...it was a kind of
a paint program for chemists. The rendering was all done internally, I
don't recall that there was any special markup language, but I could be
wrong on that...

>(Some symbolically-expressed chemical reactions might produce two
>molecules of water from the given starting materials, leading to "2H_2O".
>If that's written as "2H2O", you need too much contextual knowledge to
>make sense of such a formula. (Formula? I think so.)))
>

I'd rather see the 2 connected to the H, not the O in H2O. If you must,
"H2_O" seems closer to the mark to me.

> <-- Still hoping
>to create a sentence ending with five or more non-alphanumeric characters,
>without contriving or being unmerciful. :)
>
>

Reminds me of the one time major league baseball player Aurelio
Rodriguez, so was and still is the only major league player to have all
5 English vowels in his first name (or last) and is missing only one in
the last as a bonus!

Best,

Barry