Re: UMI Dissertation Abstracts

Zbigniew Fiedorowicz wrote:
> 
> The UMI Dissertation Abstracts Service at
>   http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations
> has started to "translate" mathematics dissertation abstracts
> from TeX into some very weird markup language on their web pages.
> Here's a sample:
> 
> <math> <f> <g>4</g></f> </math> is a complex-valued function such that
> <math><f> <g>4</g><fen lp='par'><g>n</g><rp post='par'></fen>&isin;<rm>
> L<sup>1</sup></rm><fen lp='par'><blkbd>R</blkbd><rp post='par'></fen>
> <hsp sp='0.212'><rm>&cap;<hsp sp='0.212'></rm><hsp sp='0.212'>
> <rm>L<sup><mit>s</mit></sup></rm><fen lp='par'><blkbd>R</blkbd>
> <rp post='par'></fen><hsp sp='0.212'><rm><hsp sp='0.212'><mit>
> <rm></rm></mit></rm></f> </math> for some <math> <f> s&gt;1</f> </math>;
Looks familiar to me (see below).

> While I have only a passing familiarity with MathML, this does not
> look anything like MathML to me.
> Does anyone recognize this?
Yes, it looks like AAP Math to me. AAP is the Association of American
Publishers (or American Association of Publishers -- I can never
remember
which). They created DTDs for articles, books, tables and mathematics
about 10 years ago. Their work was quite important in the early days of
SGML, especially but not exclusively within the publishing world.
I actually wrote conversions from and to that format in the early
nineties.

Regards,

Nico Poppelier
W3C Math Working Group, editor