Bugzilla

(In reply to Ben Bucksch (:BenB) from comment #6)
> This is intentional. See description:
> http://www.bucksch.org/1/projects/mozilla/16507/
> 
> Please note the general guideline: "Failures should be minimized. A wrong
> recognition is a failure, not recognizing a structure/formatting is not seen
> as failure."

With all due respect to this personal opinion of Ben at the time of designing, there's plenty of evidence from our users (e.g. 18 duplicates of similar Bug 106028) that "not recognizing a structure/formatting" *IS* seen as a failure, as it violates their legitimate UX expectations.

> Rationale: 5*b*m² = c is a mathematical formula. Given the above guideline,
> I excluded everything that starts/ends with a number, because it's more
> likely part of a formula than a bold word.

Looking at testcases and real life examples presented in my comment 8, this assumption has been refuted by evidence:
For a given digit x, structs having { *x | x* | /x | x/ } *cannot* be part of a correctly formatted mathematical formula, and thus are more likely to be intentional formatting.
And here's a qualified mathematician who concurs:

(In reply to David E. Ross from bug 106028 comment #53)
> It was argued in a comment to bug #949066 that the handling of numeric
> characters -- not applying the markup -- is not a problem, that it is
> intentional so as not to affect mathematical equations.  That argument is
> invalid.  My degree is in mathematics.  There are many equations and
> formulae that have alphabetic terms without any numeric characters.

Iow, the only case where structs can affect maths is "messy formulas":
a) 5 *4* m^2=c.   invalid/messy maths; valid struct (should be recognized as struct, this bug)
b) 5 *b* m^2=c.   invalid/messy maths; valid struct (alphabetical term in maths formula; currently recognized as struct)

There's no reason to disappoint users legitimate, real-life struct formatting expectations to "protect" invalid/messy formulas from structs. Moreover, as David points out, there's no way we could protect messy formulas because then we'd have to abondon structs recognition altogether, even for alphabetical characters, as seen in a) above.

(In reply to Ben Bucksch (:BenB) from comment #6)
> This is intentional. See description:
> http://www.bucksch.org/1/projects/mozilla/16507/
> 
> Please note the general guideline: "Failures should be minimized. A wrong
> recognition is a failure, not recognizing a structure/formatting is not seen
> as failure."

With all due respect to this personal opinion of Ben at the time of designing, there's plenty of evidence from our users (e.g. 18 duplicates of similar Bug 106028) that "not recognizing a structure/formatting" *IS* seen as a failure, as it violates their legitimate UX expectations.

> Rationale: 5*b*m² = c is a mathematical formula. Given the above guideline,
> I excluded everything that starts/ends with a number, because it's more
> likely part of a formula than a bold word.

Looking at testcases and real life examples presented in my comment 8, this assumption has been refuted by evidence:
For a given digit x, structs having { *x | x* | /x | x/ } *cannot* be part of a correctly formatted mathematical formula, and thus are more likely to be intentional formatting.
And here's a qualified mathematician who concurs:

(In reply to David E. Ross from bug 106028 comment #53)
> It was argued in a comment to bug #949066 that the handling of numeric
> characters -- not applying the markup -- is not a problem, that it is
> intentional so as not to affect mathematical equations.  That argument is
> invalid.  My degree is in mathematics.  There are many equations and
> formulae that have alphabetic terms without any numeric characters.

Iow, the only case where structs can affect maths is "messy formulas":
a) 5 *4* m^2=c.   invalid/messy maths; valid struct (should be recognized as struct, this bug)
b) 5 *b* m^2=c.   invalid/messy maths; valid struct (alphabetical term in maths formula; currently recognized as struct)

There's no reason to disappoint users legitimate, real-life struct formatting expectations to "protect" invalid/messy formulas from structs. Moreover, as David points out, there's no way we could protect messy formulas because then we'd have to abondon structs recognition altogether, even for alphabetical characters, as seen in b) above.