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

Luca Padovani wrote:
>
> Hello Juan,

Hi!

> On 30/mar/06, at 08:13, <juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com>
> <juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com> wrote:
> > - what is the argument to use some like
> >
> > <apply><divide/><ci>A</ci><cn>2</cn></apply>
> >
> > instead of shorter
> >
> > <divide><ci>A</ci><cn>2</cn></divide> ?
>
> note that, when talking about XML markup, generally shorter/longer is
> a parameter that has little weight. Structure preservation and
> uniform encoding of constructs are regarded as much more important
> parameters.

Ok.

> > - What is the reason for
> >
> > <apply><plus/><cn>5</cn><cn>8</cn></apply>
> >
> > instead of calculator-like
> >
> > <apply><cn>5</cn><plus/><cn>8</cn></apply> ?
>
> I think others have already answered this. Let me stress that <plus/>
> is a n-ary operator/function (in MathML). Also, content markup is not
> supposed to mimic any particular (=> familiar) syntax or representation.
>

Please read I said about this in other replies.

Well, authors of MathML claim that content markup mimics Lisp arithmetic.
Then the question would be why Lispy, why do not Maple or Forth or so?

Moreover the alternative

<plus><cn>5</cn><cn>8</cn></plus>

is so n-ary as content MathML is.

> > base^{index1 index2}
> >
> > of TeX systems ?
>
> this is not XML :-)

Yes, but my point was misunderstood. Please read my post-explication in
one of my previous replies. I was not claiming for a TeX-like syntax ;-)

> In general, when thinking about the XML encoding of a document, it
> usually helps me a lot to keep in mind this: information is the thing
> that matters. Information must be there, explicitly encoded in the
> document (at least those pieces of information that are relevant in
> the context I'm working in). Also, the XML encoding is (very) rarely
> the format the user will directly write and see.
>
> Best regards,
> --luca

Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Friday, 31 March 2006 14:15:52 UTC