Re: Completing suggestion on the MathML issue

Thomas, MathML is about the underlying data format for math for use by the
browser and other applications, it is not a user input syntax for
computation or authoring math.

XML is no more verbose than Mathematica full form (think of Mathematica
function arguments and options as the attribute name/value pairs of a tag).
You can look at the source of a Mathematica notebook to see an example of
Mathematica full form.  Also, remember that the Mathematica application has
to store all the default values for each function.  XML provides a clean
uniform extensible portable method of representing math.  It is appropriate
as a low level data format for use by a wide number of applications wanting
a common open language model for processing very different semantics.

I agree that we need to work on the issue of an open input and programming
syntaxes for math.  The Internet Math Consortium is working on adding math
to open languages in a uniform way.  Our design reflects the language into
which it is embedded and underneath utilizes a uniform XML representation
for serialization of objects between applications over HTTP.

Thanks for wrestling with MathML.  I am sure that many users have similar
questions and concerns.

Regards

Steve

Dr Stephen M. Hunt
Director
Internet Math Consortium
steve@imath.org
http://www.imath.org

Received on Monday, 1 May 2000 15:48:31 UTC