Notes on HTML-Math ERB Conference Call 5 August 96 --------------------------------------------------------------------- In attendance: Robert Miner The Geometry Center Bruce Smith Wolfram Research Neil Soiffer Wolfram Research Ron Whitney American Math Society Ralph Youngen American Math Society [Notes prepared by RW. Corrections welcome.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert and Neil had sent a new display-list specification to Bruce after their confab in Champaign a couple of weeks ago. Bruce opened the telephone meeting by saying he thought the specification looked good, and that he was willing to throw his quibbles in with the rest of the Board members' after Robert posts the spec to the full discussion list. Robert said he would do so soon (and has already). The group then discussed, and returned also to, some details of what information is carried in the display list. Bruce felt that some constructions in his first outline of display-list format were not really SGML compatible (he mentioned separation of items by <mc> ("math comma") elements). Neil and Robert had comments on this, but will have to fill them in since my notes are vague. There will be a change in the way attributes are handled, insofar as the rendering applications will be reading the HTML-Math dictionaries to retrieve the various default attributes of tokens, so the parser and expression-tree mapper will not place attributes into the display-list unless such attributes are overrides of the attributes in the dictionary. Ron became concerned about how much "expression" information would be assumed or required by renderers in order to do a good job with rendering data imported directly to display-list format and not mediated by the HTML-Math parser and operator precedence dictionaries. Neil said the information would be readable, but that, without expression information, one couldn't expect top-quality rendering. If, for example, the string "x+2a" is imported to display-list format, the implicit multiplication operator between "2" and "a" and its higher precedence (higher than that of "+") will not be present, so spacing and line-breaking may be compromised. We are probably in need of more extensive examples to tell whether or not the quality of the rendering for data imported directly to display-list format is lower than will be tolerated by an "average" reader of mathematics. Much will become apparent when we have a renderer in hand and have, say, imported a fair quantity of AMS TeX data to it. We discussed resource-use and capabilities of browsers. Robert mentioned that he felt the current Java code he's seeing in connection with HTML-Math will be a large amount of data to download and will probably be painfully slow. Neil said that browsers have many difficulties which we'll have to wait on them to fix (e.g. font problems and CSS). Neil commented that Dave Raggett and Steve Hunt had made a pitch to the browser vendors regarding access to fonts (true, Neil?) and that they might be responding in the near term (e.g. by the end of August). Bruce said that he would be writing parsers in both Mathematica and Java. There was a brief discussion on which environment might be speedier for development; it sounded that both had their difficulties. Bruce also has to learn Java. Ron mentioned that he hoped one parser would be available a couple of weeks before the ERB meeting Sep30/Oct1, and Bruce said such a deadline would be tight. Bruce indicated that he would post his "to do" list in regard the whole specification of HTML-Math to this list so that we can form the agenda for the Sep30/Oct1 meeting. Finally, Robert divulged that he is initiating his marriage on the wrong foot, actually choosing to tie the knot and take two weeks off while we all stew here on the Expression Tree. We wished him well in spite of this.Received on Monday, 5 August 1996 15:42:17 UTC
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