RE: Draft Node: Fill in the Blank

Hi Paul,

 

I was thinking more along the lines of allowing separate markup for each purpose:

 

- Content that determines the size of the input area (ie, phantom content).

 

- Content to be rendered but is not intended to be part of the expression's overall meaning (ie, a prompt).

 

- Content representing the "answer" that is intended to be part of the expression's overall meaning.

 

Perhaps we'd want to be able to use a single content expression for more than one of these purposes as an optimization. There might be recommendations to the user to implement JavaScript that hides or removes the prompt when the answer is non-empty.

 

What did you mean by "in-browser comparison"?

 

Paul

 

From: Paul Libbrecht [mailto:paul@hoplahup.net] 
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 10:36 PM
To: Paul Topping
Cc: Neil Soiffer; www-math@w3.org
Subject: Re: Draft Node: Fill in the Blank

 

Paul,

 

What you describe means we could invent an extra markup that indicates that the content of the blank is:

- a "blank markup" that should be deleted right away on focus entry (but restored if nothing changed?)

- a "prefilled answer", for example if the server returns an answer to be revised: it should not be removed on focus entry

- a simple "measure stab" that would allow the renderer to draw the right blank size (I think ActiveMath had this for a while).

 

What else?

(what about something for in-browser comparison?)

And, more importantly, do we need them simultaneously?

 

Paul

 

 

 

Le 5 juil. 2012 à 22:14, Paul Topping a écrit :





BTW, I had mentioned the need for such fill-in-the-blank cells way back when I was involved with the Math WG in the late 90s. Ironically, I could not get anyone interested in it at the time. I do have one comment on the proposal.

 

In the proposed markup, it appears there is no way to distinguish between (a) content that is intended only to be the blank's rendering  (e.g., underlining) and (b) content that is added that is to be interpreted as filled-in math (ie, the "answer" in a test). It would be nice for a processing program interested in the meaning of the mathematics (e.g., an answer checker) to safely ignore the former but not the latter.

 

Paul

 

From: neil.soiffer@gmail.com [mailto:neil.soiffer@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Neil Soiffer
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 11:48 AM
To: www-math@w3.org
Subject: Draft Node: Fill in the Blank

 

Several interesting issues came up when the structure guidelines I mentioned in previous email were being developed. One of those was how to represent in MathML "blanks" that should be filled in by a student.  The main issue for the DAISY guidelines was how to let assistive technology know that something was a blank so it could be spoken appropriately, but any solution should also work for online assessment (etc) in general, not just for those using assistive technology.  To address "fill in the blanks", the MathML Working Group has come up with a draft note: 
http://www.w3.org/Math/Documents/Notes/blanks/fill_in_the_blank.html

There are several open questions (see the end of that document), and we would appreciate feedback on both those questions and on the proposal in general.  Please send comments and questions to this email list.

Let the discussion begin,

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com <http://www.dessci.com/> 
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, Equation Editor ~