William F. Hammond writes:
 > (But nobody plans to author directly in MathML.)
depends what you mean by `author in MathML'. is Amaya `authoring in
MathML'? seems like it to me

 > Amen.  Of course, you write not only the software that processes <foo>
 > but also a dtd (document type definition) that serves in some sense as
 > an outline for the software logic.
if you want, yes. recommended, but not mandatory

 > done by processors.  Before any serious processing is done your macros
 > need to be fully expanded.  (We don't see that expansion with our eyes
 > when using TeX-based systems.)
and lord, how much heartache that blindness has caused us all over the
years...

 > presentation format.  And one might want to think very carefully about
 > exactly when, along the road, "\alpha" (oops, in xml I mean
 > "<alpha/>") should be resolved to unicode (which is what happens if I
 > write "&alpha;".
no, sorry, untrue. &alpha; is resolved to whatever your DTD resolves
it to. it can resolve to <alpha/> if you want. or <b>alpha</b>. well,
entity expansion has some problems, so in fact <alpha/> is more
flexible, but lets not claim that there are any hard-wired mappings
for &alpha;

sebastian