Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

> 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

________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 11:16:55 UTC