# Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:16:08 +0100
Message-Id: <200803311116.m2VBG8rY029923@edinburgh.nag.co.uk>



> The IteX:
> The equivalent MathML:

the generated mathml is rather more verbose than needed

<mstyle fontweight="bold">
<mrow>
<mi>H</mi>
</mrow>
</mstyle>

for example is the same thing as

<mi fontweight="bold">H</mi>

Once those redundant levels are removed the main  author shorthand is
using TeX names for the symbols. Using entity names in HTML is already
problematic and I don't see anyone really suggesting adding a couple of
thousand character names in TeX  _\_oint syntax is going to be any
less of a problem than adding them in SGML _&_oint; syntax.

Without symbolic names for characters, _no_ markup for mathematics is
going to be usable without a certain level of editor support to map from
names (or graphical menus) to the uniocde slots. I probably have spent
as long looking at unicode character numbers for mathematics than anyone
(I edit that part of the MathML DTD) but I never remember more than half
a dozen numbers.

With a small amount of text editor support such as closing open
elements and less perhaps small amount of text editor support such as
auto-completion of element names based on language knowledge, it doesn't
really take many more key strokes to type
\frac{\partial \mathbf{D}}{\partial t}
as
<mfrac> <mo>&PartialD;</mo><mi mathvariant="bold">D</mi></mfrac>

David

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