RE: Marking Up Mathematical Symbols

You can use Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/) to construct MathML.

John Colby 
Support Tutor specialising in mathematics, Learner Support Centre (G312),
The Business School, Galton Building, University of Central England,
Birmingham B42 2SU
Tel: +44 (0) 121 331 6937
Essential Website - http://essential.tbs.uce.ac.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Alexey Beshenov
Sent: 12 September 2007 16:02
To: Andy Laws
Cc: WAI Interest Group list
Subject: Re: Marking Up Mathematical Symbols


On Wednesday 12 September 2007 17:38, you wrote:

> Can any one please advise on best practices for marking up Mathematical
> Symbols such as ------> ø

Unicode contains most of the needed symbols. I think you mean mathematical 
expressions, not only separate operators/signs.

You should use proper markup language for mathematical content, MathML. It's 
not widely supported (as far as I know, by Geckos native engine and MSIE 
standalone plugins only), but it's supposed to be the most accessible 
technology.

If you need to support users with old graphical browsers, you can use images. 
Good idea is to prepare them with LaTeX (as far as I know, there are no 
better rendering engine) and use LaTeX code as alternative text. There are 
some XSLT solutions for LaTeX to MathML conversion, so there are no need to 
work with LaTeX manually.

Anyway, it's better to suggest users to choose from MathML and images.

See the W3C MathML FAQ http://www.w3.org/Math/mathml-faq.html for more 
information on MathML (note that some information on implementations isn't 
up-to-date).

P.S. It seems that your message contains typo. 'ø' is the U+00F8 "LATIN SMALL 
LETTER O WITH STROKE" (which is not a mathematical symbol), I think you want 
to use the U+2205 "EMPTY SET".

-- 
Alexey Beshenov <al@beshenov.ru>
http://beshenov.ru/

Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2007 15:27:20 UTC