Re: Whither MathML support?

On Thu, 2017-09-07 at 13:56 -0400, Daniel Bennett wrote:
> 
[...]
> The second question, and as a strong supporter of XML, is it possible
> to 
> semantically represent math with XML? For example, there is no real
> way 
> to have page and line numbers in XML as well as paragraphs that span 
> them, as this breaks nestedness. 

The usual approach involves thinking of page breaks as separations
rather than containers and then using empty XML elements to represent
them; the same for line divisions (except for poetry, where the lines
are part of the content).

For rhetorical overlap with structure, such as a quotation that goes
from the middle of one paragraph to the middle of the next, a
representation of one structure or the other as primary and using
attributes to link together e.g. a continued quotation, is a common
approach.

The people at the Text Encoding Initiative and more generally Digital
Humanities have been doing these things for decades, so it's a question
of knowing where to look ;-) There've been papers on representing
overlap in XML presented at Extreme Markup and, later, Balisage,
conferences.

Best,

Liam

> 
-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2017 18:03:42 UTC