- From: Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:05:21 -0400
- To: "'Neil Soiffer'" <Neils@dessci.com>
- Cc: "'Bruce Miller'" <bruce.miller@nist.gov>, "'Henri Sivonen'" <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "'David Carlisle'" <davidc@nag.co.uk>, <ian@hixie.ch>, <public-html@w3.org>, <www-math@w3.org>
> The statement that "math is for the scientific community" occurs so often... and is so > wrong. Think back to your days in school. Everyday, in every school, every child is > taught math. Math on the web is only special because it and diagrams are the only > formats that show up every day in documents used classrooms that aren't supported by > HTML, except as inaccessible and poorly integrated images. This is actually exactly why I switched stances earlier. The simple ability to display numbers, even without the full semantic context that MathML provides, is part and parcel of a complete document format. The Web browser doesn’t need to know that it is displaying a series, but it needs to be able to put the sigma and all of the “decorations” in their proper places. I think that if MathML does indeed have a “presentation specification” which allows math and numbers to be displayed, without the complicated overhead of the semantics/meaning of the math, we have a winner for inclusion in the HTML spec. I would like to extend the proposal by suggesting that the “wrapper” tag contain an optional attribute pointing to a full and complete MathML document for user agents that are fully MathML capable, and/or allow a CDATA element with the full MathML. This way, more “uplevel” user agents (such as Gecko) can continue to provide (or be extended to provide) full MathML functionality, while at the same time, “downlevel” user agents (screen scrapers, for example) don’t break due to lacking the full MathML implementation. J.Ja
Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 21:06:11 UTC