Re: on variables in MathML

Dear Andreas,

Thank you very much for your kind remarks in regard to the present MathML
draft and for your suggestions as to how to improve it.  They come at a
very suitable moment for we are about to have our next face-to-face mmeting
so that we can tie up our draft and proceed to a proposal.

Your point about scoping in the content markup context seems to me a good
one, and the integral construction a good example.   There is one problem
with the notion of integration as a mathematical notion for me:  there are
several ways of looking at it.  For instance, it is a sort of calculational
prescription as in the examples given, or it hought of as a linear
functional or in terms of measure (and probability).  Perhaps these various
semantic slants do not need to be captured at the basic level though.  It
will all provoke further useful discussion.

The way of describing what in the US is colloquially sometimes described as
K-14 (kindergarten through first couple of basic college years) well has
not been found.  Your mention of German "high-school", gymnasium
presumably, reminds us of this appropriately.  At least half a dozen of the
Working Group members were not brought up in the US school system so we
ought to be able to come up with better phrasing.

The recent availability of the Unicode characters in sample GIF form over
the net has been a welcome development.   We haven't yet made use of it for
the MathML WD but I expect will.  The character and entity work which is
still unfinished, has overlapped somewhat with that of another group which
is looking at scientific and technical characters (STIX mentioned in the
draft).  There we have been making use of the Unicode GIFs to ensure
clarity as to what is being discussed and to compare with other
publication's lists of characters to check completeness.  This work is
still in progress, having taken longer than we hoped.

Best wishes,

		Patrick Ion
		(HTML-Math WG co-chair)

Received on Friday, 26 September 1997 10:28:36 UTC