- From: William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:10:33 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org
James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk> writes:
>> 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>∂</mo><mi mathvariant="bold">D</mi></mfrac>
Actually there's no denominator in this MathML. (The pace of this
discussion has become a bit frenzied, hasn't it.)
<mfrac>
<mrow><mo>∂</mo><mi mathvariant="bold">D</mi></mrow>
<mrow><mo>∂</mo><mi>t</mi></mrow>
</mfrac>
The original LaTeX is much closer to this author-level XML:
<frac>
<numr>∂<mathbf>D</mathbf></numr>
<denm>∂t</denm>
</frac>
Less cpu is burned going from the LaTeX to the author-level XML than
is burned going from the author-level XML to the MathML. Most of that
is involved in accurately constructing, with a recursive descent, the
tree of the mathematical expression -- something that has an abstract
mathematical reality independent of the design of MathML (but not
invariant from author to author).
If math is included in html5, will html5-browsers be 'required'
to support it? (Have any so committed?)
Even if html5 browsers are going to provide such authoring services that
really belong in the author's shop, I fear that html5-math will wind
up with the reputation of being unacceptably slow. (And I fear that
could be its downfall.)
The following xhtml+mathml item has 1086 mathml nodes, out of 3250
elements in all, and is still a bit slow for a document of that size:
http://math.albany.edu/math/demos/nyjm/9-8.xhtml
I don't want to think about slowing down such an article significantly
more with authoring services in the browser.
Math aside, ordinary HTML is not a convenient format for direct authoring.
So why all the attention to the idea of direct authoring of math?
-- Bill
Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 15:11:17 UTC