Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > Chris Rowley writes: > > Only in the "real soon now" world; I would say that, even with the > > mega-bucks behind it, it still needs to be `real-world tested'. > > > an awful lot of people have their shirts on XML. its extremely widely > deployed. are you still waiting for Java to be real-world tested too? Me, I am not waiting for anything. I have laready wittered on too long about the differences betwen a computer programming langauge and a document description language so I will just say that this is irrelevant. > some people are still waiting for everything except FORTRAN to be > real-world tested. Not me, but XML is nothing if it is not both usable and used in a wide variety of contexts. I hope it will be but mega-shirst are not the only thing needed to make this happebn. > > > 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. > leaving me out of it, since I have no views, That never stopped you expressing them, did it? > why is your math more > "real" than their math? your view comes over as awfully elitist and > snobbish :-} Did I say it was more or less real? All I said was that their philosophy of and hence (probably) their use of notation is different, no quantitative assessment was given. Maybe to a publisher maths is maths is maths, but not to those who have to try and teach it to a vast range of people. An interesting example of a major difference between different uses of math notation, in countries that use Cyrillic script, was brought to my attention recently and may be of interest to some: amongst the more classical users of maths, such as physicists, mathematicians, etc, only occasional, specialised use is made of Cyrrilic letters within math notation; however, within subjects such as economics, it is common for the basic variables such as x, y to be replaced by Cyrillic letters, and for operators such as min, max, sin, cos etc etc to also be replaced by the local name in Cyrrilc script. > > > level). It's use of notation and its relation to the semantics are > > very complex and probably;y not well-understood (they are more like > > the relationship of natural language to the real world than like the > fine. you carry on with presentation mathml. no-one forces you to use > content mathml. i dont see any conflict Neither do I, but them I am not trying to generate or look for conflict, maybe you are? Your opinion is interestingly different to Dr Carlisle's: he said I need to go the other the way, beyond content MathML to OpenMath. But what I do is neither here nor there: I am not interested in any particular constituency, publishers, academics, Ms users, etc, etc. So let us depersonalise and depoliticise this and broaden the discussion beyond your commercial, anti-academic, anti-elitist, spin-doctored, text-bites:-)? > presumably you would agree, then, that one possibility is a new LaTeX > (presentation) math markup learning the lessons of MathML? I always agree with you, don't I? It's just that you never agree with me:-). chris