Displaying a square root with HTML

[2011-10-04] dev, html5, webdev, math
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This post shows two ways of displaying a square root with HTML.

Pure HTML for older browsers. The following HTML source

    &radic;<span style="text-decoration: overline">2</span>
is displayed as
2
Not all browsers display the above equally well, but it is always readable.

MathML for newer browsers. The following HTML source

    <math><msqrt><mi>2</mi></msqrt></math>
is displayed as
2
With MathML being part of HTML5, all modern browsers support MathML. Which is a god-given for those of us who remember the HTML documents that were generated from LaTeX source files by converting formulae to bitmap graphics.

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