Re: Where do the "default renderings" in spec chapter 4 come from?

Would it make sense that the MathML default renderings, for some  
symbols, really are multiple to remind the diversity to a reader which  
may forget it? Lcm and interval are examples we can easily provide...

Paul



Le 13-janv.-09 à 17:06, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> a écrit :

>
>
>
>> Has there ever been a debate on a particular rendering,
>
> most of them date back to mathml1, which is 10 years, there probably
> were arguments but obviously we're far too polite to remember them
> now:-)
>
> As far as I know the Math working group has never actually voted on
> anything, we always reach agreement in the end (even if only that all
> but one person is too tired to argue any more:-)
>
>> Sure -- but given the importance of MathML, your "suggestions" do  
>> have
>> a high impact.
>
> Actually we need to stress more that they should _not_ have as much
> impact as people think. We need to have some "default default" and  
> some
> variant of English usage is as good as any, but we have to avoid any
> suggestion of cultural takeover. If you (or more importantly your  
> users)
> are (say) German and the letters "lcm" don't denote whatever's the  
> German
> for Least Common Multiple, then you should feel absolutely no  
> hesitation
> in making the default rendering for <lcm/> in some system be  
> whatever is
> the local convention. Similarly ]a,b[ instead of (a,b). In an ideal
> world of course all such preferences would be user-configurable but  
> the
> world is not always ideal, and there is no implication that it is more
> correct for a system to default to English usage than German or  
> Arabic.
>
>
>> Why \subset for the proper subset but not \subsetneq?
> Again this predates my time in the WG, but I think that the natural  
> markup is
> to use the subset symbol for proper subset, and subset eq (with a line
> under it) for subset-or-equal.
>
> Of course some people use subset symbol for subset-or-equal and then
> need to use \subsetneq for proper subset but as I say sometimes you  
> have
> to make an arbitrary choice.
>
>
>> Why f' but not df/d?
>
> I don't think I've seen df/d (with no named variable). In the form  
> with
> differentiating a function term f so there is no bound variable I  
> think
> f' or D(f) is what I'd expect, but again there is a lot of cultural
> background to people's expectations for this type of thing. Especially
> the difference between the ' (or  .) markup and d/dx markup is  
> famously due to
> a notable German and a notable English mathematician not getting on  
> too
> well:-)
>
>
> David
>
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Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2009 21:19:33 UTC