I don't believe that anyone could rightly argue that, for instance, musical symbols were "esoteric". They're a standard part of my culture. And yet, I still can't put a treble clef in my document using the standard Windows fonts, and nor can I put it on a web site and believe that it will be viewed correctly by most western viewers.
Um, as an off-and-on musician, I tend to expect a treble clef on a staff, and I don't really expect my OS to handle musical notation. I suppose if I wanted to say "here is what a treble clef looks like" on a web site, I would have to use a graphic. I'd have to do the same thing to show what a rose looks like. (And if I wanted to demonstrate its smell, I'd be out of luck.)
By exactly the same reasoning, I expect all the math symbols to be there too, including mathematical alphanumeric symbols. This is not a strange or exotic requirement, it's just a part of living in this western culture and wanting to use they symbols of my culture.
The bulk of math alphanumerics can be represented with markup, using standard fonts. Sure, it's no good for interchange, but viewers of a web page can *see* italic "a" (assuming they can see) with a simple <i>a</i>.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
