Why (and how) I am using XML and MathML
Richard Kaye · MSOR Connections · 2006
We probably were drawn to TeX in the first place because for the first time it provided all the mathematical characters we needed in a series of 7-bit fonts. But nowadays there seems to be a consensus on how characters should be encoded in computer documents. The unicode standard is out there and increasingly being used to provide standardised encodings of characters beyond the basic ASCII character set, and sadly unicode is incompatible with TeX’s 7-bit kludge. Search engines, like Google, do remarkably well in indexing PDF and PS files, but they would do even better on an en-unicoded (or is that uni-encoded?) HTML web page, especially if it involves special mathematical characters or accented characters.