Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 9:02 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>
> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, Bruce Miller wrote:
> >
> > I personally think the most compelling case for annotations, especially
> > in a web context, is to provide presentation MathML for display to
> > humans, along with the corresponding content MathML (when available) for
> > export to applications (or perhaps for audio rendering, or ...).
>
> I agree, but that isn't a problem we're trying to solve for HTML5:
>
>   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/New_Vocabularies
>
> Nobody includes the equivalent of content MathML when writing their papers
> using LaTeX. Why would they do so with HTML?
>

They don't do it in LaTeX because they can't do much with it.  In MathML,
you can copy and paste the expression you see on a web page into a
computation or graphing system and do something with it.  Most of the time,
the system can guess correctly what is meant by the MathML, but
mathematicians love to reuse notations for similar concepts.  Once you step
outside the bounds of  "everyday" math, the likelihood of guessing
incorrectly starts to go up quickly.

    Neil