Notes on HTML-Math ERB Conference Call 29 July 96 --------------------------------------------------------------------- In attendance: Robert Miner The Geometry Center Robert Sutor IBM Ron Whitney American Math Society Ralph Youngen American Math Society Other people whose first names began with a letter other than "R" were asked to leave. [Notes prepared by RW. Corrections welcome.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- We proceeded in the order of the proposed agenda. Sutor is "Bob" in these notes; Miner is "Robert". Acknowledging Bob's recent posting on Stephen Watt's return to IBM this fall, Ron asked if others had opinion on giving our materials to Stephen and the Safir group for critical comment. Robert felt that it might be more difficult to modify our work later to accommodate Safir suggestions, so we should send our materials sooner rather than later. Bob mentioned that all of France is on holiday in August, so that we might not get any reaction for a while. No one on the ERB has spoken yet against Watt's proposal, but then it's also not clear that everyone has had a chance to even hear of it. Please do let RW (and the rest of the list) know if you have reservations. There was brief discussion of Ralph's overview. Robert said he agreed generally with it. See more below on where we are and what we hope to accomplish in our Boston meeting. Discussion of the Hammond posting centered on the validity of Hammond's contention that it is very important that we produce something of MIME type text/html. Bob felt that we would actually be in *better* position by producing something of another MIME type since this would facilitate the use of plug-ins. If our markup is good and there is plug-in support, major browser manufacturers may pick it up themselves, but they needn't from the onset. Bob reported on discussion of HTML-Math at the OpenMath Workshop which met in Zurich over the weekend. He made a brief presentation in Zurich which outlined the objectives listed on our ERB page, showed the list of committee members, and mentioned the 4 viewpoints (Wolfram, MINSE, Pike, OpenMath) outlined in a message from RW to this list a couple of weeks ago. Comment at the Workshop sounded generally favorable toward the efforts of this ERB, and in any case it appeared that the Consortium members wanted their relation to the HTML project to be advisory and not competitive. There was some strong sentiment that HTML Math should allow specification of "context" information (this had been called "lexicon" information at one time) so as to account for OpenMath's "object" layer of transfer. As in the Pike DTD, contexts are domains of mathematical discourse (e.g. linear algebra, differential geometry, quantum mechanics; domains form some form of tree or DAG), and context information is supplied by pairing an object with a domain. (Bob can fill this in further. I'm imagining the pairing as between notation and object [e.g. <"i", complex unit of Complex Analysis>], but this appears more as a triple: <notation, object, context>.) The four attendees of the conference call felt this capability is well within the contextual information we have discussed as being part of HTML-Math. We should remain aware of OpenMath's work in contexts. Bob mentioned that he would post URLs and other information resources as they become available. Concluding the call, Robert said he felt that things had come "undone" to some degree and was concerned about where we would be come October. Ron said that he felt the Wolfram proposal had been just that, and that although there had been some discussion on it, the original view of it was as a proposal and not as a formally agreed upon specification or even direction. Given the difficulties of carrying on business with email and with weekly telephone conversation, it is hard to feel that consensus is being reached. Ralph suggested instituting a formal process whereby specific proposals are discussed and voted upon in a certain time frame. Ron said he felt that we could institute such procedures, but that he would prefer pushing discussion by email until the October meeting and discussing such administrative procedures then. Ron will make an effort to focus issues and conversation between now and the October meeting.Received on Monday, 29 July 1996 15:37:54 UTC
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