Re: political strategy for MathML

Hi Bill,

You wrote:

> A better avenue would be to have a net-served down-translation from
> the authoring language to XHTML+MathML which every CAS is expected to
> know something about.  

I might add that there is a fairly decent hope that browsers will also
know about this, at least with some help from XSL stylesheets, etc.

> With luck somebody will have some code libraries to share so that the
> down translations from various XML applications -- which will not be
> a CAS responsibility -- have hope of getting things right. 

And maybe some we could have code to down translations from other
languages too.  I personally like this model a good deal, at least as
a transitional strategy, and maybe even as a long term solution.

Given your views on open source software (I did notice the
word 'share') I expect you will discount this, but one of the WebEQ
tools is designed to be used as a server module, doing the down
translation of documents on the fly. 

Another that I have played around with is using XSL transformations to
do conversion of other XML applications into XHTML/MatHML.  For
example, you can use James Clark's xt style engine as a server module
to convert documents on the fly, or I understand that the 5.0 browser
from some company called "Microsoft" will apply XSL stylesheets too.
I was pretty pleased with what I could accomplish, though I haven't
had time to push anything through to the point where I could
distribute it.

Looking into my crystal ball, I predict you don't have too long to
wait until this kind of functionality is widely available in an open
source setting.  Given how prevelant the anti-establishment,
lets-hack-all-night-since-I-had-12-cups-of-coffeee archetype is in the
math world, I think it is inevitable!!

--Robert

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Robert Miner                          http://www.webeq.com
Geometry Technologies, Inc.           email: rminer@geomtech.com
                                      phone: 651-223-2884
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Received on Friday, 29 October 1999 12:06:21 UTC