Notes on HTML-Math ERB Conference Call 19 August 96 --------------------------------------------------------------------- In attendance: Patrick Ion Mathematical Reviews Bruce Smith Wolfram Research, Inc. Neil Soiffer Wolfram Research, Inc. Bob Sutor IBM, Yorktown Ron Whitney American Mathematical Society Ka-Ping Yee Alias|Wavefront, Inc. [Notes prepared by RW. Corrections welcome.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ron opened by discussing whether and what to send of our materials to Safir for review. Neil, in off-line conversation, had indicated concern that the Wolfram proposal's incomplete state might lead to wasted time on the part of reviewers. The teleconferencing group felt that, given Stephen Watt's current membership in the larger ERB, Safir could actually access whatever materials it wished and review accordingly. For the Wolfram proposal, Bruce suggested that Safir start with the posting of 31 May and read later notes and correspondence for updates and modifications. Correspondence and position papers posted earlier than 31 May run the risk of being quite out of date. All materials we are currently considering are accessible from the AMS ERB page as starting point (this includes both the Wolfram proposal and a link to the MINSE pages). Conversation then shifted to a discussion of the appropriateness of ISO 12083 as a starting point for Wolfram's "display list" specification. Bruce pointed out that display list format was not intended as only a point of departure for visual rendering, but as the base for all renderings (visual, audio, CAS, etc.). Bruce (in the Wolfram proposal of 31 May) described display list format as a stage of processing so as to delineate where template-matching would occur in the sequence of events (to wit, template matching operates on the expression tree and is part of the process which creates the display list). Bruce felt that ISO 12083 is *not* a good base for display list format since 12083 need not contain the full "expression" information which display list format does (e.g. the scripting examples posted by RW show that the "base" of an object scripted needn't be marked as such). This is also a point which Neil had made in earlier conversations. Bruce felt that, for those using HTML-Math to present legacy data on the Web, the options are to either "upgrade" to HTML-Math by filtering with a local operator-precedence scheme or to accept the possible negative formatting consequences of displaying with "degraded" information. Ron said that he could forsee AMS production accommodating an operator precedence scheme within its production stream in the future, but didn't think legacy data would be filtered using one. In any case, since the intent of display list format is not to produce an intermediate "visual display" data structure, the view that ISO 12083 can be used for such a thing requires modification. Visual browsing will be part of the software we present to W3C as a model for HTML-Math. Whatever specification we give for HTML-Math itself, browsers (or plug-ins) will have to pass to visual display. Whether a canonical display language (such ISO 12083 or TeX) can interface cleanly to this remains open. It is a stated goal of our committee that filtering from visually oriented markup to HTML-Math be possible, but the quality of the result and the requirements for filtering have been left open. Discussion then moved toward semantics and modes of capturing semantics in the Wolfram proposal and MINSE. Neil said he felt that the issue of semantics was very large and ill-defined (everyone's notion of semantics is different). Patrick acknowledged this, but also commented that attendees at a Panel Discussion at the summer AMS meeting last week in Seattle showed great interest in Internet communication on the K-12 level. Since K-12 semantics is much more straightforward, we shouldn't discard (not that Neil said he wanted to) the possibilities of enabling robust semantical markup. Bob pointed out that, at least initially, most semantical markup may be provided by software (CAS for example) and not human operators. Ping remarked that he felt MINSE allowed a good entry to semantics and that it enables downloading style and notation definitions. Bob asked whether the idea of textual annotation has been considered in our deliberations. We have indeed discussed this to some extent, although problems have not been entirely solved. There is facility for adding text strings in both the Wolfram and MINSE approaches, although we have not seen our way through the full problem of text within math within text within ... . The phone call ended with exhortations by Ping to comment on MINSE features, and by Ron to provide concrete agenda for the Sep30/Oct1 meeting.Received on Tuesday, 20 August 1996 13:47:06 UTC
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