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• #### Re:"Centuries of refinement" ? (Score:2)

I believe it's at that point in the article that they reference Cajori, the author of an amazing book on the history of mathematical notation. I don't have it handy, but there are all kinds of notations that we take for granted today, that were formerly written in several different ways by different authors. It's an interesting book to pick up and read a few pages at various points in the book, although it's not meant to be read cover to cover. The book is filled with things like "person A used this notation in paper B in 1734" and gives an example, "while Person C used this other notation in his 1736 paper D." (another example)

Brett

• #### Re:How relevant is it to most of us? (Score:1)

on that note:
how are the articles about nanotechnology relevant to most of us? or what about D-VHS? synthesizers made from old commodore 64 parts?

this is news for nerds...
i think all of the above catagories including the incorporation of mathml specs into the html standard apply to nerds of one type or another.

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
• #### not meant for hand coding, rather machine2machine (Score:3)

on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @09:04AM (#520980) Homepage
If you actually look at the code to express something simple such as (a+b)^2 in MathML it looks quite unwieldy compared to how simple it would look in TeX. At first, this seems like a huge turn-off for those of us who are used to typing in TeX or HTML by hand. But we need to remember what MathML is trying to be: the low-level format to exchange mathematical ideas.

The standard proposes to do lots, including:

Facilitate conversion to and from other mathematical formats, both presentational and semantic. Output formats should include

• graphical displays
• speech synthesizers
• input for computer algebra systems other mathematics typesetting languages, such as TEX
• plain text displays, e.g. VT100 emulators
• print media, including braille

Anything which will allow input and output into Mathematica and TeX both (let alone the others) is going to not be something that you can not type directly by hand, so for this standard it would be unfair to expect that. Instead, it is important to make sure that the standard includes the important mathematical notions that will port from TeX and computer algebra systems. (to me, that means all of TeX and LaTeX except the page-layout specific features, and most of Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab...)

It may be that the standard is trying to do too much or that it would only be useful to the mathematical elite, but given the ambitious role it is clear that the standard will need to be complicated and presumably not suitable for unaided digestion or production.

See the standards page here [w3.org], for the 12 line code for the expression for (a+b)^2.

• #### Re:Welcome to the world of XML (Score:1)

It's kind of funny. The reason I started useing LaTeX is because word once crapped out on my and I lost a crapload of stuff. I wanted something that even if it crashed I could still recover the raw information. I turned to LaTeX because all i need is a text editor and a dvi viewer. Anything with equations/pictures/etc in word would crash after 5 pages, you just don't have that problem with LaTeX. Now they have made a markup language so complicated i have to use a frontend to generate my documents. It seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
• #### Re:TeX (Score:2)

TeX is a Turing-complete language; this makes it difficult to do automated things to tex documents, because an innocent \foo could contain anything -- paragraph breaks, page after page of automatically generated text. This is why tools such as LaTeX2HTML still occasionally fail on documents that do fancier things than the conversion program is prepared to handle. MathML is verbose, but it's also purely declarative (at least for now), and therefore easier to process. You could create a TeX subset for math equations only -- no \def allowed -- but then it's not TeX any more.
• #### Re:get the math right (Score:1)

really thought:
e(i*pi)-1 = 0

is a beautiful equation. in incorporates all of the important numbers e, pi, i, 0 and 1. i've often thought that if i ever got a tatoo that would be it. yes i know i'm a nerd.

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
• #### Re:Tex, here's why: (Score:1)

There is a TeX plugin from IBM, it's called TexExplorer or something like that. By the way, I don't see how you can do a search in a bunch of text files for a particular kind of formula (`search for all the formulas containing 'something' to the power three inside an integral'') ... I hope this MathML stuff will make that kind of things possible.
• #### Re:Bloatware and older browsers (Score:2)

One of the tags that was eager to see in HTML4.0 is the socalled OBJECT tag. The tag is supposed to work as such (OTTOMH, so errors are mine):

OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.mpg" TYPE="video/mpeg"> OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.png" TYPE="image/png"> <OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.gif" TYPE="image/gif"> A picture of myself. </OBJECT> </OBJECT> </OBJECT>

Notice how if the browser has no idea on OBJECT, it just reports the text. If it does know how to handle OBJECT, it looks at the type in the first tag, sees if it can handle it, and if not, continues down the embedded OBJECT list until it does find a type it can handle, or otherwise the 'alternate' text. This was to replace IMG since the alternate text can now be appropriately marked up with HTML.

So for a MathXL situation, I'd have the mathxl in the outer loop, a gif of the equation in the inner one, and possibly something like troff equation output as the alternate text. Those that have browsers that render MathXL would see it with no problem, those without it would see the equation still, and those in text mode would see the troff eq. Of course, this would require a bit more work on the part of the page designer, but certainly I'm sure tools would be made available to convert mathXL to gifs easily.

The problem is, guess how many of {IE|NS} for {PC|MAC|Unix} have adequete support for OBJECT?

• #### Re:Yet another twist (Score:1)

Sickening. We won't have any real improvements in browsers for a couple years yet at their snail's pace.

Waitaminute! SVG is a Candidate Recommendation, which means, they are actually waiting for implementations to be non-sucky. So you just write code instead of rant here!

• #### typesetting vs. markup (Score:1)

Again we run into this problem... trying to make HTML documents *look* the way we want.... people try and get around this sort of problem by doing silly things like putting invisible images in web pages to get things to line up right...It seems MathML is some kind of bastard stepchild between the original beginnings of HTML and the LaTeX philosophy.... I guess XML was supposed to solve all of that, but I think that needing special programs to generate a document because the tags are so complex is a little much... I know it's been said before, but maybe some LaTeXish thing would be better... relatively simple to code, yet robust enough to remain flexible... I mean $\frac{x^{2}}{y_{3}}$ just seems alot nicer than the junk you'd have to write to get the same result in the current specs for MathML. But then again, I guess it won't matter if I write latex2mathml.pl anyway. :)
• #### Re:Does this still require a plug-in? (Score:1)

"Needless to say, I'm not very comfortable with depending on browser plug-ins for anything."

Well, a browser plug-ins are no different than a software or hardware update.

If you disagree, than you should still be using a 1980s hardware and software.

Yes, it is a pain. But there is no gain with out a pain. Go figure. :-)

• #### Re:How long... (Score:1)

And when they do, it will run slow and be full of security vulnerabilities and allow scr1pt k1d33s to haXor your site.
• #### Does this still require a plug-in? (Score:4)

on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @07:27AM (#520990) Homepage
Something like this would be schweet if it became widely accepted. HTML is OK for most things, but mathematical notation and things molecular diagrams in Chemistry have to be represented with image files which can, of course, be a real pain in the ass.

Our little college is looking into MathML as a possible way to give online placement tests to incoming first-year students, and I found that it required special browser plug-ins to work. So I'm guessing that a browsers like Opera, kfm, and my grandmother's TV internet appliance are just out of luck. Needless to say, I'm not very comfortable with depending on browser plug-ins for anything.

How soon is it going to be before browsers support this stuff out-of-the-box, without me having to download and install a stupid plug-in?

========
Stephen C. VanDahm
• #### How relevant is it to most of us? (Score:1)

From the spec [w3.org]:

MathML markup is not primarily intended for direct use by authors. While MathML is human-readable, which helps a lot in debugging it, in all but the simplest cases it is too verbose and error-prone for hand generation. Instead, it is anticipated that authors will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML.

--

• #### Re:Whoever decided on that font on the w3 site (Score:1)

The font looks to be defined as "sans-serif", so the problem is yours, bub.
• #### Re:kewl-la-la-la (Score:1)

Yes I'm laughing ... but I do that and I like it.

I've used and still use some VT 320 to surf the web (lynx), trace graphics (with gnuplot on a DECwriter) and, of course, play tetris !

And i'm very happy because i've recently got a VT510 that I've been able to link to my Linux box ... wonderful !

--
• #### TeX and MathML (Score:1)

Of course, as per the linked document [w3.org], MathML isn't supposed to replace TeX any more than PostScript is - it's meant to be machine-generated from easier-to-input forms such as TeX.
• #### Re:MathML Finally Starts Showing Up (Score:1)

sorry. in html.

http://puccini.che.pitt.edu/~karlj/Classes/CHE2101 /l04/ [pitt.edu]

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
• #### TeX (Score:2)

Well, I'd still prefer how TeX does it... much more compact. I am somewhat uncomfortable with using a huge number of tags for complex (extensive) formulas.

Moz.
• #### Working group membership... (Score:1)

Anyone else find it strange that Microsoft is on the working group, and Netscape is not? Where was Netscape on this one?
• #### Re:I don't quite know what to make of this... (Score:1)

Umm.. you do realize that this is 2.0, right? :)
• #### Sounds...useless (Score:1)

With the dominant browser being IE and MS' consumer focus I really don't see this standard ever being implemented for a meaningful percentage of people. And then MS will implement it just wrong enough to make it worthless.

I hate to say it, but if you're really doing this stuff you probably already know (La)TeX, so you can just write it up in that and generate a graphic, or distribute the (La)TeX. Using graphics to represent this stuff on the web isn't optimal, but at least you know it will work and display right. (Sorry to you freaks who browse text only ;)

Chris
• #### Re:And this applies to me how? (Score:3)

on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @07:38AM (#521000) Homepage
The reason there's a W3C recommendation for MathML, and not a non-proprietary vector graphics format, is because this has been a thorn in the sides of many mathematicians and scientists for years, and they've been working hard at fixing it.

I am not aware of the history on any of the vector attempts, but I do not believe that there have been as many people working on it for as long. After all, many people have their vector needs served adequately by any of the many proprietary plugins, since all they need is for people to be able to view the output; but those needing math to communicate have a much longer history of open information sharing, and need a common language.

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