[wtbob]

Why did he write '\(2\frac{1}{2}\) or \(3\frac{1}{2}\)' (which presumably uses JavaScript to be rendered), when he could have just written '2½ or 3½'? It'd have taken 8 bytes to store instead of 36 — and that's not even counting the size of the JavaScript!

As long as folks keep on reinventing the wheel, only bigger, hard drives are going to have to keep increasing in size.

[msbarnett]

I'm not sure that using LaTeX markup, a format that predates HTML, counts as "reinventing the wheel".

[wtbob]

Oh, I love LaTeX dearly — but it's not part of HTML, and in this instance UTF-8 handles it perfectly well.

[aninhumer]

If you already have the maths rendering script in place for more complicated uses, and you don't already know a quick way to insert the ½ character, then it's just the path of least resistance.

[kyberias]

I was wondering what you're talking about but then realized that the US keyboard layout does not have the ½ symbol right there in the keyboard like we have in Europe.

[aninhumer]

There are a wide variety of keyboard layouts in use in Europe, and a quick investigation suggests few include ½.

What country are you from?

[kyberias]

I know. I'm from Finland. Look, I'm not arguing that everyone has the ½ in their keyboards. On the contrary, most people don't. It's just funny that some people might think ½ being hard to type and some people think it's easy and it's really dependent on their keyboard layouts. :)

[derefr]

Besides laziness, perhaps there's a slight semantic justification—I imagine there exists at least a few mathematical solvers that can ingest data of the TeX form and work with it, but probably fewer that understand how to ingest Unicode codepoints.