Re: semantic markup for math

Daniel W. Connolly writes in <199607191502.LAA28309@anansi.w3.org>:
>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.

Although we at TCE could have used the expired HTML 3.0 draft math, it does 
not mesh well with the direction of the rest of HTML -- structured documents 
that take advantage of SGML features like marked sections, etc.  (In the 
meantime, we must use the unstructured Microsoft Word, which does not have 
the rich set of automatic tools seen for SGML document processing.)  The 
symbolic math folks are absolutely correct in pursuing structural math 
markup, as "more structure" is the direction HTML is heading in.  Structural 
markup, for both tree structures of text and tree structures of math, is 
just a lot easier to automatically process.  If human knowledge is doubling 
every 18 months, or if it is just increasing faster than the number of 
humans, human knowledge will require automatic processing in order for 
people to keep up with it.

Keep up the good fight, Dan.
======================================================================
Mark Leighton Fisher                   Thomson Consumer Electronics
fisherm@indy.tce.com                   Indianapolis, IN

Received on Friday, 19 July 1996 14:39:33 UTC