On 7/22/13 2:53 AM, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
2) TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be lost.
"Native" content (e.g. <maction> or even subexpression links) has no
counterpart in TeX. Conservative extensions of TeX can easily enable
this
kind of content but backward compatibility will be lost.
If this means MathML as the canonical format, i.e. people write
MathML into articles directly, rather than it just being an
output/rendering format, that gives me moderate worry:
1. From the perspective of being able to repurpose Wikipedia articles
outside of a web context, TeX-format equations are nice for articles
in the math/science sphere, since TeX-based publishing workflows are
common in math/science, and equations are particularly tedious and
error-prone to convert by hand, if that would end up necessary.
Admittedly, in some workflows there's no real difference: you can
import both MathML and TeX equations into MS Word with appropriate
plugins (I haven't looked into whether the two import paths differ on
compatibility). Perhaps as HTML-based print workflows improve this
will drop off as an issue, but right now only a smallish proportion
of people are using workflows based on something like PrinceXML, and
the free-software alternatives to PrinceXML are further behind.
2. From a wikitext-readability perspective, TeX-format equations are
the de-facto standard way of ASCII-fying equations, e.g. in plaintext
emails, while MathML isn't written in a syntax any humans normally
write. So using TeX as our underlying representation makes equations
possible to edit in text form, at least for people who already
professionally work in areas where that's common, while MathML
equations virtually require a visual editor (unless the idea is to
use something like ASCIIMathML?).
What??!!?? sorry I didn't get a thing from
this. :-)
Current scenario is: In our current Math extension, textvc is simply
unable to generate equations in png except Latin languages. Also
Mathjax is heavily client dependent (Unsupportably dependent) and has
its own serious bugs.