David wrote:

> these days, have another
> hat which says `W3C Math (MathML) Committee member'. It's not all bad,
> you know:-)

Interesting, interesting! I find every TeX guru somewhere in the
*ML world. Today I was looking at the XML FAQ, and found
\emph{The Typographer}'s name there (i.e., Peter Flynn).
Where should I fly? :)))))))))

> MathML only looks large
> because you make the mistake of looking at it. GIF is much larger
> but you don't (unless you are Sebastian) try and read it bit by bit
> in a binary editor.

A somehow good, somehow bad comparison. The good part is known,
the bad part is that I want to author the MathML, and know every
bit of it. Even if the world goes using MathML for math writing,
I will clang to writing it by hand. I can't install a
graphical MathML editor on every platform I use (currently Linux,
MSDOS, Win95, and VMS).

> I tend to use emacs for everything, in case you hadn't noticed emacs
> users are a minority.

Someone has said (I can't remember who):
   ``Life is too short to learn emacs''.
The first time I got in emacs, I could not get out and killed the
process from another session :))))) Since then, when I use a piece
of software, I first ask: how can one get out of it? ;)

> Some of us will continue to use that kind of interface, but MathML
> offers the hope of using systems like Scientific Word, and even
> Microsoft Word via the MathType/Equation Editor thing and getting

Oh oh! First rule: good freely available TeX material should exits always.
An undergraduate student whose father's salary is 100 dollars in month
can't buy softwares, and this is the case in Iran. (Sorry for localizing.)

> something useable out the back, not some obscure rtf extension (out of
> MS Word), or LaTeX (out of Scientific word) which is even more obscure to
> many people...

Many people, but not everyone, I think even if I get very professional
in MathML, a simple MathML formula like the famous equivalent of
x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4ac}}{2a}
seems very obscure to me.

> There is a very large class of users who would greatly benefit from
> being able to enter essentially school or undergraduate level
> mathematics in a wysywig fashion and have the mathematics being portable
> from their wysywig editor into tex for decent mathematical typesetting,
> and (soon?) into browsers for online display, but also symbolic algebra
> systems such as Mathematica, or Maple

I agree.

--Roozbeh