Re: Mathematical selection

Dear Paul,

we have already talked about this, and I would like to publically 
re-state my opinion that only approach #2 can really work. If you want 
something content-aware, you have to go by content markup. Of course, if 
presentation MathML was generated from content-aware representations, we 
could assume that it would sprinkle enough <mrow> and related elements 
over the presentation, that the content-aware groups are all there, and 
we could go with approach #1, but in reality, much of the 
presentation-MathML is produced from presentation-oriented processes 
(e.g. by transforming LaTeX) and this assumption is plain wrong and 
therefore dangerous.

Of course, you will only realistically get parallel markup, if you 
generate it from content-oriented methods anyway :-).

Michael

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   Prof. Dr. Michael Kohlhase,         Office: Research 1, Room 62 
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Paul Libbrecht wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
>
> in the experience of developing copy-and-paste of mathematical 
> formulae for ActiveMath we came to the following two (ideal) 
> requirements a browser should satisfy to provide user-friendly 
> copy-and-paste of formulae.
>
> - one of them is to allow HTML-pages to receive and give clipboards 
> content in a safe way... I'm pushing this idea at the 
> public-webapi@w3.org mailing list currently
>
> - the other is more mathematical and is the subject of the mail: 
> currently selection of formulae is done as text selection which often 
> yields "non mathematical" results, such as the selection of "a+b" in 
> "3*a+b".
>
> I am unclear about a clean definition of mathematical selection. The 
> best I could find thus far would be to select "sub-terms" only which, 
> I believe, correspond to subtrees in a MathML-content or OpenMath 
> matching tree. Comments welcome there.
>
> How can we enable a "mathematical selection" ?
>
> A level 1 approach would be to rely directly on the tree structure of 
> MathML-presentation, enlarging text selection by the smallest subtree 
> containing it, this is not a complete solution as sometimes terms have 
> to be output using several boxes... but it's an easy and universal one.
>
> A level 2 approach would be to work with parallel markup and enlarge 
> any text selection to the presentation match of the smallest 
> content-sub-tree containing the content-match of the smallest 
> presentation sub-tree containing the selected text (!).
>
> Comments welcome!
>
> paul
>