mfenced as a special case of mrow -- Was: angle brackets in math

David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> writes:

>> I hope you are not saying that _any_ processor, e.g., a processor trying
>> to upgrade presentation mathml to content mathml should first translate
>> every mfenced to mrow in the manner described.
>
> Whether or not it converts one to the other, any mathml processor should
> treat these two forms the same way.
> mfenced is defined to be a syntactic shorthand for a particular
> combination of mrow and mo. One possible way of ensuring that the two
> forms are processed in the same way is to do a pre-pass that expands out
> mfenced, but that isn't required (or even a testable condition, since
> it's an implementation detail). Why do you see a problem with this, it's
> been specified this way since the earliest drafts of mathml 1?

Example 1.  An xml normalizer.  Surely that should not translate mfenced
            to mrow.  OK, so one says that an xml normalizer is not a
            mathml processor.  (But still I'm frowning.)

Example 2.  Get in Maple.  Make a list, say [a,b,c].  Then call
            MathML[ExportPresentation] .   I see the obvious mfenced
            string.  But if I then call MathML[Import], there is
            semantic loss.  Without seeing the source, I suspect that
            the underlying Maple code has, in effect, mapped the
            mfenced to an mrow because it took the docs more seriously
            than I have been taking them.  Maybe somebody here knows.

It's fine for browser-class processors.

Presentation markup is only minimally semantic, but I am concerned
about conservation of semantics to the extent possible.  An mfenced
represents the mathematical concept of list.  An mrow represents the
concept of mathematical expression.  An expression with a single first
order subexpression is essentially the same thing as that subexpression
but not so for a list with a single component.

Why is it thought to be important to _define_ mfenced to be
effectively an alias for profiled usage of mrow?

                                   -- Bill

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 18:34:53 UTC