Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
wrote:

>
> > Hmmm.... On the one hand, I very much sympathize with your
> > point of view.  However, one can already do some of that now,
> > modulo interoperability (or lack thereof) of <object>, etal.
>
> Which is really my stance. :) If people really want to be able to embed
> MathML (or any other format), they can write browser plugins that do this.
> But by the time I finished writing this, I realized just how wrong I was.
>
> > Sorry, but Math _is_ special....
>
> Only because of HTML's original usage to exchange documents within the
> scientific community. Just because a high concentration of the people on
> this list are math oriented does not mean it needs to have a special
> exception.


The statement that "math is for the scientific community" occurs so often...
and is so wrong.  Think back to your days in school.  Everyday, in every
school, every child is taught math.  Math on the web is only special because
it and diagrams are the only formats that show up every day in documents
used classrooms that aren't supported by HTML, except as inaccessible and
poorly integrated images.

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of Equation Editor, MathType, MathPlayer and MathFlow ~