Phone conference 13 May 96

I am back from WWW'5 in Paris, and ready to continue discussions
in our phone conference slot at 1pm EST   tel:  +1 617 258 7910

Looking forward to talking with you about the recent SGML Math
workshop in Champaign and our next steps for progressing HTML Math.

At this point it seems a reasonable strategy to work on a mutually
agreed linear syntax for "high school math" that can be deployed
with plug-ins or Java applets etc. by later Summer or early Fall.
My perception at Champaign was that there were good prospects for
Wolfram, Maplesoft and Design Science to agree on such a syntax.

The initial step would be for us to finalize the lexical level and
work together on the syntax. My goal is to define a meta-language for
math typesetting that can be used to define extensible math notations
for each area of math. Initial work on high school math will be used
to develop this meta-language and to provide a means for companies 
to deploy plugins that interoperate with those from other vendors.

I would like to extend the plugin mechanism for browsers to support
HTML math elements directly, and have some ideas for the transition
issues this would involve. In the short term, though, we will need
to exploit the existing mechanisms based on the IMG, EMBED and APPLET
tags.

Regards,

Dave Raggett  (working today at home: +1 617 489 2369)