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Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago)

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Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:22:43 GMT

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 > it still needs to be `real-world tested'. Clearly it fails that test today, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. > I am not trying to knock it > MathML and Sebastian's ideas of semantic mark-up cater very well for > the ideal of what Physicists and Computer Scientists (ie people who > designed Mathematica and Maple) think maths and maths notation is. True. The phrase that you are supposed to use in this context (for some strange reason) is ``K through 12'' I am not sure if that automatically means anything to American readers, it didn't mean anything to me until it was explained that this meant basically starting school until first year University. Ie almost no 20th century mathematics. Not surprisingly, 19th Century Mathematics is by now reasonably stable, rather like LaTeX 2.09 I suppose. > The kind of maths I indulge in (when not indulging in chat on serious > e-mail lists, etc etc:-) is not like this, But (Content) MathML is not designed for you. OpenMath is. OpenMath is what I am supposed to be doing (when not indulging in chat on serious e-mail lists, etc etc:-). The import of MathMl for OpenMath is that it potentially supplies a rendering mechanism. > Don called a `subformula' but which is very badly handled (both > syntactically and semantically in `standard TeX/LaTeX'). Since Chris and I appear to be pretending to reply to each other's messages while in fact speaking to a wider audience, I could point out in particular the fact that not everyone seems to realise, that if you put something inside {....} in TeX in math mode the effect is rather strange, all spacing is frozen, and all line breaking is prevented, just as if that had been an \mbox construction if you actually used an explicit box, it would also fix other things, like \textstyle, but in all other respects groups in math mode behave like boxes (except for \begingroup groups which just behave really strangely:-) A typical MathML renderer is recommended to progressively alter its line breaking behaviour depending on the depth of mrow nesting, which is rather different from the TeX all or nothing behaviour. (As far as I know none of the currently available MathMl renderers actually do this, or get anywhere near TeX quality generally, but it is early days yet). David