Re: semantic markup for math

In message <199607190920.CAA03410@shellx.best.com>, Thomas Breuel writes:
>Daniel W. Connolly writes:
>
>Yes, depending on how you want to break the formulas, that's clearly
>true (I can't get at his paper right now to read it, since my W3C
>member password seems to have expired and my IP address hasn't been
>registered yet by W3C...).

The page isn't protected... I just gave the wrong URL (again)!
	http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Math/

But it's only a citation for the thesis: I read it in hardcopy.
I suppose you can order it from UC, but I'm not sure how.

Ah! The UCSTRI to the rescue again:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu:800/cstr/search?soiffer

Yields:

	ftp://tr-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/tech-reports/csd/csd-91-626/

which is a bunch of OCR's tiff images. Have fun!

>Several thoughts, though:
>
> -- Do we really need linebreaks at all?

Interesting questions. It kinda comes down to: once somebody has
bitten off the task of Math for HTML, where should they stop?

It seems that the people who have actually bitten off the task of Math
for HTML are the folks who do symbolic math packages, and they don't
intend to stop until they've got interoperability with their packages.

Unlike tables, the implementation of math in Arena didn't seem to
convince too many people that it was worth doing.

Hmmm... Does UdiWWW do math? Yes... I see that it does:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/math/html/index.html

How about Emacs-w3? Nope:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/docs/w3_2.html

I'm pretty sure grail doesn't.

It seems like the big pull for "pictures of math" (as opposed to
symbolic/semantic math) would be scientific publishers.  And the
copyright enforcement/payment infrastructure on the web isn't mature
enough for them to bother.

The other community I'd expect to pull for this is the same folks who
use LaTeX to write papers: the math and CS community. I'm surprised
that nobody in that community has hacked Mosaic to do math.

I know the folks who are working on Amaya have done several editors
that support math in the past.

The plans for Amaya:

	http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Amaya/Activity

focus on stylesheets and I18N for the forseeable future (till the
end of 96, at least). If you can argue that math should pre-empt
one of those, Vincent Quint is the guy to talk to.

He has been thinking about math:

------------------
A reference implementation of HTML

Amaya currently implements the latest version of HTML, HTML 3.2. It
will be used to test and experiment future extensions of HTML, such as
a richer model of tables or mathematical formulae.
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
------------------


You might also note the plans (or lack thereof) for Arena:

	http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Arena/Activity

Dan

Received on Friday, 19 July 1996 11:03:00 UTC