Re: Technical reasons for some options taken on design of MathML

juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com wrote:
[snip]
> 
> I said in a previous communication that the phrase "Elsevier adopts
> MathML" was to be very debatable. It may be interesting to note here that
> in last Elsevier’s CEP 1.1.0-1.1.3 (the core of Elsevier’s 2005 XML DTDs
> family)
> 
> 238
>    U
> 92

That sure looks like chemistry to me, not math.
Elsevier may have reasons for not adopting an explicit
chemical markup language, but using an arbitrary
text pre sub/superscript markup is arguably _less_
wrong than using math markup, whether MathML or any other.

Suggesting to use math to markup uranium, is
simply using the fact that math has handy
machinery for dealing with scripts --- the thing
you're marking up isn't math.  It's the same
as using math to add a "nd" superscript to the 2
in "2nd edition".  Ie. it's an abuse, albeit
a common one.

It may well be that MathML's markup for scripts
is less than ideal, but examples from chemistry
aren't convincing.

-- 
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/

Received on Monday, 17 April 2006 17:16:24 UTC