Re: Math and MathML [visual and aural rendering]

Patrick Ion said:
> Dear Juan,
>
> Another complaint was:
> 3) unified solution to visual and aural rendering of special tokens as
> differentials, between others.
>
> The obvious fact is that by providing explicit markup for a
> differential d, because it is a very common symbol these days, MathML
> encourages coherent rendering of calculus text in visual and aural
> streams.
> The specification does not, and could not reasonably, specify the actual
> rendering of something like 'dee by dee eks' when the desired
> vocalization
> is dependent on the target natural language.

Just this year a folk worried because he was obtaining undesired visual
rendering when using the entity for differentials. Reply here was someting
close to "do not use it, use <mo>d</mo> instead".

Using the mo token one obtains "adequate" visual rendering but one lost
aural capabilites (as explained in the MathML spec).

Using the MathML entity one lost aural capabilites and maybe some
searchability but the visual rendering was then not the desired by that
folk.

An unified solution (both aural and visual) is lacking and we can observe
in MathML pages i review and analized in canonical science today (more
pages from more sites will be reviewed in future issues) that
differentials are encoded as <mo>d</mo>, <mi>d</mi> or even <mi>dx</mi>.
That is not structurally correct and visual and aural quality rendering
can be poor that using old HTML 3 code.

> Patrick

Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Monday, 17 July 2006 11:56:27 UTC