Re: Spacing and formatting across multiple math tags

In a some sense, xhtml serves much the same purpose for browsers that 
postscript does for printers.  One generally just writes the printer 
code necessary to cause the printer to show (say the appropriate 
thing.   It  is generally an information loosing transformation,
although conventions and a clever use of  div, span  with class 
attributes  can  do better (as can a clever use of postscript functions).

Thus, I'm really seeing two requests, at least one of which can be 
easily modelled right now.

1.  The capability of embedding (some) xhtml in some part of  mathml (so 
that we can drive the printer better) - This has significant 
implications for mathml display engines and is an extension to 
presentaiton mathml.

2.  Introduction of one or more meta-math structure to describe 
multi-step solutions. (an extension to content mathml)

There is nothing to prevent  modelling this meta-structure in xml and 
mapping it to tables (or using CSS directly ) for presentation right 
now.  Such a thing could move into the spec once it stabilized.

Stan Devitt

Bernd Fuhrmann wrote:

>
>
>
> > However I think a more portable solution would be to use an xhtml 
> table to get the layout and use individual math elements in teh xhtml 
> table cells to typeset the math fragments.
>
> Using tables for formatting would break the semantical structure of a 
> XHTML+MathML-document. Furthermore there are cases that would require 
> to use presentation instead of content markup which would be bad 
> aswell. Besides, using tables would force a renderer to put certain 
> data into certain places, while I think that one should be able to 
> "recommend" formatting. This is especcially important when there are 
> very long terms  and/or narrow pages that require line breaks. A table 
> could never solve that!
>
> If there is indeed no way to do this in a reasonable way with MathML 
> 2.0 to do this, someone should add a mechanism to the next MathML specs.
>
> Regards,
> Bernd Fuhrmann
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2003 09:21:56 UTC