Why I Miss Command-Line Programming

Here is the HTML I’m rendering:


<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ‘-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN’ ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd’><html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<title>Software Carpentry: Computational Complexity</title>
<meta name=”author” content=”Greg Wilson” />
<meta name=”company” content=”Third Bit” />
<meta name=”date” content=”Sun Jul 12 17:32:26 2009″ />
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”format/style.css” type=”text/css” />
</head>
<body>
<ul>
<li>Well-developed mathematical notation.</li>
<li>For any functions f,g : &#x2115; &rarr; &#x211D;<sup>+</sup>, write f &#x2208; O(g) to represent &quot;f grows on the order of g&quot;.</li>
<li>Mathematically: f(n) &le; cg(n) for all n &ge; B, for constants c and B.</li>
<li>Intuition: f grows <em>no faster</em> than g, to within a constant factor and ignoring any finite number of exceptions.</li>
<li>For example, 2n+7 &#x2208; O(n) because 2n+7 &le; 2n+7n = 9n for all n &ge; 1
<ul>
<li>But also 2n+7 &#x2208; O(n<sup>2</sup>) and 2n+7 &#x2208; O(2<sup>n</sup>), <em>etc</em>.</li>
<li>However, 2n+2 &notin; O(1).</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>


Here is the appearance with Firefox 3 on Windows XP:
ff31
And here is the appearance with IE7 on the same platform:

ie71

0 thoughts on “Why I Miss Command-Line Programming

  1. Paul Boddie

    Works presumably as intended for me on Firefox 3, Kubuntu Hardy (8.04). I imagine that the font Firefox uses has bad size information, and IE is just being stupid as usual, although you could try and use the actual characters in your XHTML instead of the entities. (A quick Python script would do the job of replacing one for the other rather nicely.)

  2. Jeff Balogh

    I don’t see any character issues with IE8-as-IE7, so no help there. I don’t know what’s in style.css but you probably want to use a CSS reset.

    IE7 is being replaced by IE8, so it wouldn’t be terrible to not bother with it. People aren’t stuck with 7 like they are with IE6. And we have a shiny new Firefox 3.5 waiting for you over here.

  3. Greg Wilson

    @Paul: tried various combinations of entities, hex character codes, and direct UTF-8; no joy.

    @deif: haven’t looked at YUI; any idea if it plays nicely with Eric Meyer’s S5?

    @Jeff: Much as I wish they would, I don’t believe people will upgrade their browser just to get my slides to format nicely :-)

    @Alex: was set on using LaTeX, converted the notes, ran into endless trouble getting HTML as well as PDF output, gave up and went back to straight HTML.