@Mark Just to clarify. Personally, I don't
think wikitext's math format
should move away from a TeX-like input language. The point I was trying
making was that a conservative extension would be useful if MathML becomes
a desired output. It seems to me that texvc was specifically designed to
prevent fully fledged TeX input, so I wonder if it wouldn't help everyone
if wasn't required on the backend anymore, only that the syntax stayed
backward compatible.
@paveenp I don't know what you mean by "unsupportably dependent". I am
also
not aware of "serious bugs". Could you be more specific?
Peter.
On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
On 8/2/13 7:07 PM, praveenp wrote:
On Friday 02 August 2013 09:06 PM, Delirium
wrote:
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.
I read Peter's point 2 as discussing the possible "native" use of
MathML
tags, i.e. permitting people to write MathML into articles, rather than
only using MathML as an alternate rendering path for texvc/MathJax/etc.
If
MathML is a render-only target, then "TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be
lost" doesn't seem like it could be an issue. So unless I'm totally
misreading, I took the discussion to be about allowing MathML in
articles,
which could break TeX compatibility since not all MathML tags can be
rendered back into TeX equivalents. The two points above are my two
concerns w.r.t. that suggestion. Am I misreading the suggestion entirely?
-Mark
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