Re: Whither MathML support?

Bill and folks,

One could always show equations with graphics, especially SVG. Why 
bother with MathML at all then? I thought the idea was to have 
mathematics that could be represented as math. I have seen HTML go 
through similar bumps with texts. GIFs were the best way to show stylish 
text and alt attribute provided the actual text. Yet we have advanced to 
allow for embedded fonts and SVG to allow text to be better represented 
with great presentation.  So again I ask whether MathML is up to the job 
of representing the math well? Perhaps this is behind the reticence to 
fully incorporate MathML into browsers.

I remember the first time I saw a PowerMac while visiting Apple. They 
showed me the included calculator that allowed for playing with 
polynomials, dragging and dropping, along with immediate graphing of the 
equations. Makes me wonder if MathML will make this type of work easier 
in web pages or not.

Daniel


On 9/7/2017 2:58 PM, Bill McCoy wrote:
> Daniel, it seems to me that the precursor question is: is it possible to semantically represent mathematics in a single general declarative data format? Whether that data format could reasonably be XML, JSON, or something else seems a second-order question as it would be moot if the answer to the first question is "no".
>
> I would think of systems like Mathematica as embodying possible existence proofs but yet it seems that it is both leaning on programmatic scripting and (per threads like https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/28162/alternatives-to-mathematica) not able to handle all the various disciplines that comprise "mathematics" (not to mention the various other fields that use applied mathematics).
>
> In any case this seems like a knowledge representation question more so than a publishing question. E.g if it was possible to represent mathematics semantically it would be fodder for AI first and foremost, and only secondarily fodder for presentational publishing.
>
> So I think that this group should probably punt on this problem as both being beyond its scope and likely insoluble.
>
> --Bill
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Bennett [mailto:daniel@citizencontact.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 7, 2017 11:19 AM
> To: public-publishingbg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Whither MathML support?
>
> Hoping that someone will answer the questions I posed. This was non-responsive to my questions.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Daniel
>
>
> On 9/7/2017 2:03 PM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
>> 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
>>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2017 19:25:37 UTC