Sine Qua Non

A Better Mousetrap?

I find it ironic that in the commenting and reporting throughout the blogosphere on Dan Rather's fundamental comprehension problems concerning superscripts that most of the popular blog software products do not handle superscripts in html correctly, at least with respect to line spacing. Oh, they make the "th" as a superscript alright, but in doing so they shift the whole line down so as not to have the superscript write over the characters in the line above. Unfortunately, the net effect is to screw up the spacing between the line with the superscript and the line below it.

Here are some examples: Movable Type at Michelle Malkin and Instapundit, and Typepad at Professor Bainbridge.com and BeldarBlog. Strangely enough, this blog uses Movable Type and while the problem shows up clearly while editing the post, it seems to come out alright when viewing the final post in IE. Immediately following the text is a screenshot of my Movable Type editing page.

abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz
And here is a line with Ra^thergate in Movable Type to illustrate the problem.
abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmmnopqrstuvwxyz