Re: Contributing to MathML 3 ?

Dear Robert,

Robert Miner schrieb:
> It'll take me a bit to go through all the points you list here, but I
> wanted to quickly respond to

Thats perfectly understandable, it took me a while to gather all these
comments :)

>> And, last but not least, a comment on <mu>:
>> What would be the exact difference of rendering <mu> and <mtext>?
> None, as far as I can see.  That is the major reason for not adding a
> <mu> tag.  It's only purpose would really be semantic, to identify its
> contents as a unit.  But as we are talking about presentation MathML, I
> don't see that as a strong justification.  This is the same line of
> reasoning that lead the authors of the Units in MathML Note to suggest
> indicating units with a class attribute.  The Note suggests using <mi
> mathvariant="normal"> since units function as identifiers.  But of
> course, it is also perfectly valid to use <mtext> in which case the
> mathvariant is unnecessary.

Then IMO there should be no special text for units. From an implementers
side, it is very annoying to have to ways of doing essentially the same
thing, which means two possible places for bugs but no added value. If a
distiction is needed between units and "regular text", then a "class"
attribute should work just fine.

For content markup, however, introducing a unit elment (cu?) would be
fine, as this is what content markup is for.


Here is another item, which is unclear in the MathML 2 spec:


When menclose contains multiple notations, how should these be applied?

Assume this case (it does not make sense, but it illustrates my point):
<menclose notation="longdiv radical">[...]

Should it be interpreted the same as:

<menclose notation="longdiv"><menclose notation="radical">[...]
The longdiv notation on the outside, the radical on the inside

<menclose notation="radical"><menclose notation="longdiv">[...]
The radical notation on the outside, the longdiv on the inside

Or should both enclosures (radical and longdiv) be drawn on top of each
other?

Of course the example radical / longdiv does not make any sense, but
there is a slight difference when specifying "box horizontalstrike",
where the horizontal strike may be just through the content, leaving an
empty space between it and the box, or extending to the borders of the box.

> --Robert


Max Berger
e-mail: max@berger.name

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