Re: proposed ARIA role for math [DRAFT 1]

Sorry for the dreadfully slow response -- travel is killing me.

FYI: TeX, LaTeX, etc.  TeX is basically a programming language, although
most people don't think of it as such.  Much of TeX's functionality is via
using one of its many macro packages.  LaTeX is one such package.  Many
journals implement their own macros for submission.  TeX's power is also
what makes it difficult to import in general since you can add new
functionality and pretty drastically change what TeX looks like, even at the
syntax level.

For math, this tends not to be too hard a problem since people tend to use
the base set of macros along with a few added by LaTeX.  Some more advanced
math, such as tensors or matrices might have differing macro for them, but
at least for simple matrices, I think two macros are commonly used.

The bottom line is that for most math, you don't care whether it is TeX or
the LaTeX extensions, or AMSTeX, or macro packages, they are similar enough
that a single processor can handle them.  And if someone doesn't use this
base set, a processor would have trouble unless they implemented the TeX
engine and read the macros, or built in knowledge about the functions for
that package.

I am somewhat ambivalent about labeling the expression.  It is easy to tell
the difference between TeX and MathML, and most new math notations for input
are similar to TeX.  The exceptions would be if someone used Maple or
Mathematica or some other computation system's language.  They are somewhat
different from TeX.  Labeling would help in situations like that, or if
someone had some other format such as MathType's MTEF format which is an
ASCII representation of its internal format.

    Neil

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Aaron M Leventhal <aleventh@us.ibm.com>
wrote:

>
> I don't know the answers to all these questions. Can you come to the next
> phone meeting so we can discuss them?
>
> Rich will have to say why he wanted to leave it open-ended. I guess I'm
> with you -- I'd rather have it up front.
>
> My example probably had incorrect syntax -- I don't personally even know
> the difference between TeX and LaTeX, which is why I'm trying to ping Neil
> Soiffer here for feedback as well.
>
> - Aaron
>
>
>
>
>  *"Simon Pieters" <simonp@opera.com>*
>
> 03/06/2008 11:16 AM
>   To
> Aaron M Leventhal/Cambridge/IBM@IBMUS  cc
> brewer@w3.org, "Neil Soiffer" <Neils@dessci.com>, neil.soiffer@gmail.com,
> "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, public-pfwg-comments@w3.org,
> unagi69@concentric.net, w3c-wai-pf@w3.org, w3c-wai-pf-request@w3.org
>  Subject
> Re: proposed ARIA role for math [DRAFT 1]
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:16:01 +0100, Aaron M Leventhal
> <aleventh@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> > In general we agreed with what you say below on the last PF call.
> > However,
> > some felt that specifying TeX or whatever should be a best practice and
> > not in the spec.
>
> But how do you implement it? Should the UA autodetect whether it's TeX or
>
> LaTeX or something else? How are authors supposed to know what to write?
> How do we achieve interoperability? What's the advantage of leaving it
> open-ended?
>
>
> > See the thread I started called 'New role="math" in ARIA, how to author
> > and how browser would expose it'
> > In that thread we're discussing some of the remaining issues, and you
> can
> > see the current definition.
>
> The current definition doesn't seem to handle:
>
>    <object role="math" data="foo">a^2+b^2=c^2</object>
>
> Also, when would it be better to have the expression in another element
> than as text in the element itself (i.e. when is labelledby needed for
> role=math)?
>
> Finally, I don't know (La)TeX very good, but shouldn't $ or $$ be implied
>
> around the expression?
>
> --
> Simon Pieters
> Opera Software
>
>