- From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:17:41 -0400
- To: Daniel Bennett <daniel@citizencontact.com>, public-publishingbg@w3.org
On Thu, 2017-09-07 at 14:18 -0400, Daniel Bennett wrote: > Hoping that someone will answer the questions I posed. This was > non-responsive to my questions. Sorry. Speaking as someone who used to maintain a version of eqn, the troff preprocessor whose language helped inspire TeX's mathematics, and as someone who thought about SGML representations of mathematics back in ISO 12083 days, ... :) Mathematical language is a mix of nested and non-nested constructs. XML can represent everything you can do in TeX, at least in theory, but (as you implied) the transfer syntax can become unwieldy. However, I've yet to see a syntax for mathematics that isn't unwieldy sometimes. There are tools to generate MathML online, and to convert to it from LaTeX and other notations and back (although not arbitrary TeX, since that's a Turing-complete macro-programming language!). So yes, you can represent mathematics with markup such as XML, at least up to grade 13 level (end of high school/first year of university). After that you start getting into areas of mathematics where people invent their own notations and there's no system on the planet that can represent that out of the box (obviously). So then you use the presentation markup, or subvert some other semantic markup, just as people do with TeX - e.g. "this isn't really a matrix, it's a partition diagram in algebraic topology" but that's OK - short of a theorem proving tool, there's not much software can do with such things: they communicate ideas between people. I hope that's more on topic :) Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, XQuery WG Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
Received on Friday, 8 September 2017 01:17:47 UTC