Precomposed ½ vs Fraction Slash Combo

The vulgar fraction one half (½, U+00BD) is a single precomposed character from the Latin-1 Supplement block representing the fraction 1/2, while the sequence 1⁄2 uses the fraction slash (U+2044) between the digits 1 and 2 to build an arbitrary fraction from three separate characters. Unicode provides only a limited set of precomposed fraction characters (including ¼ U+00BC, ½ U+00BD, ¾ U+00BE, ⅓ U+2153, ⅔ U+2154, and a few others), whereas the fraction slash (U+2044) lets you construct any fraction from numerator and denominator digits, though rendering depends on font support. The fraction slash differs from the common solidus or forward slash (/, U+002F): the fraction slash is specifically designed to sit between superscript numerators and subscript denominators, and OpenType-aware applications will render a⁄b as a properly styled fraction if the font supports it. For web use, MathML or CSS-styled spans typically give better cross-browser fraction rendering than raw Unicode; the precomposed fractions like ½ are safe and widely supported, but the fraction slash approach may not render correctly in all fonts or browsers. In HTML, the precomposed fractions have named entities: ½ for ½, ¼ for ¼, and ¾ for ¾; fractions beyond these require either numeric character references or MathML.