Re: Inline equations

Bruce Miller said:
> juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com wrote:
>>
>> Dario.tambone
>>
>> Unfortunately, the MathML structure does not fit well with CSS.
>
> This comment seems rather misleading in the context of the question.

I doubt! Dario.tambone expressed his initial aim to use CSS for displaying
math in different ways: centred, inline, etc. This apparently is based in
his misconception (popular one) that MathML is designed for full fitting
with CSS, when is not (situation is still poor in real browsers
implementation). I carefully warned Dario about this with the aim of
preventing him from *future* issues in the same topic of the relationships
between CSS and MathML.

> Most of George's (very intersting, btw) considerations relate to
> being able to display mathml in a browser that doesn't support
> mathml natively, using nothing but CSS.  For that purpose, yes,
> mathml's structure and css's selectors don't match very well.

No exactly, so far I can see many George’s research is addressed to
MathML’s problems to fit on rest of XML-CSS technologies. It is true that
George is working in CSS-math for browsers does not supporting MathML, but
also is true that he neglect that Browsers as Opera add native MathML
support due to weakness of the specification.

For that purpose? Difficult to believe! In his criticism to my approach he
wrote (available in Canonical Science Today): “In particular such a markup
does not fit in XML + CSS publishing framework (and in this way repeats
one of the mistakes made by MathML developers)”. Do not you believe that
he is also critizing native MathML browsers since final MathML pages
cannot be correctly addressed via DOM and CSS?

Why you think that he recently said “I don't think that MathML is the
right way to go for web browsers [...]”?

> The question Dario asked related to whether there was a CSS property to
> set the very math specific displaystyle.  Currently, there isn't ---
> neither for MathML nor for any other "CSS friendly" math markup.

Please note also I said how could use the display= “inline” attribute in
the math tag for obtaining the desired result. Apparently, you fail to
understand that lacking explicit block tags, the correct output ***would
be*** obtained via a CSS rule ***acting*** in the mathematical tag if one
follows the general web philosophy (already in the past MathML was rudely
critiqued on this topic and last 2.0 specification corrects part of those
topics. Do you remember the now deprecated “mode” attribute of first
MathML?). There exist significant changes in the MathML 2.0 specification
and I suspect would exist still more significant changes in one 3.0
specification regarding stylistic aspects.

I find rather surprising the deprecated nature of style color attributes
in last XHTML whereas one maintains mstyle color in MathML 2.0.

Dario explicitly said us

“I\'m trying to insert this style tag in the css associated with the page,
but I
don\'t know how to do...”

You replied his doubt on how obtaining the correct inline display. I also
did but, moreover, I said to Dario that MathML does not work well with
usual splitting of content (tags) from presentation (CSS) and his initial
program (surely based in their experience with XHTML + CSS) was incorrect
because MathML “special” status.

In some way, I was preventing him from future errors of this class.

> If the only issue was the size of the symbols, there is no reason
> using CSS to increase the font size within math wouldn't work.
> (although there is no official requirement for it to work, AFAIK;
> and plugin-based renderers are perhaps less likely to honor the CSS).
>
>  Of course,
>> one can use some CSS styling but just for some points. See
>>
>> [http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/2006/02/choosing-notationsyntax-for-canonmath.html]
>>
>> for some discussion on problems with CSS that people from Opera
>> browser and mathematician George Chavchanidze is founding with the
>> MathML specification.
>>
>> The attribute \"display=\'block\'\" of math tag display in block and
>> centered the equations selected. The equations are displayed inline
>> via the attribute \"display=\'inline\'\".
>>
>> See examples of use of "inline" and "block" in next pages
>>
>> http://www.canonicalscience.com/en/researchzone/nanothermodynamics.xml
>>
>> http://www.canonicalscience.com/en/researchzone/canonical.xml
>>
>> Compare the size of symbols in first (block) and second (inline)
>> equations on last above link.
>>
>>
>> Juan R.
>>
>> Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
>>
>>
>
> --
> bruce.miller@nist.gov
> http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Tuesday, 14 March 2006 13:32:40 UTC