On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 12:01:20AM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
One of the first pages that I looked at was [[Wikipedia:How does one edit a page]]. I didn't edit any pages seriously until reading that. Not everybody is like this, but some people are. Now, if I hadn't known TeX already, I wouldn't have been heartened to see a reference to it. What do you propose to write there?
That mathematical variables are preferrably enclosed in [$ and $] and that if you want to use sub- and superscript in them you can write [$x_n$] and [$c^2$].
Apart from that there would be another section containing more explanation for writing complex math with [$ .. $] and [$$ .. $$]. This would probably be the same as what you would write for [[math: ..]]. We cannot get around mentioning LaTeX somewhere.
The point is that you keep criticising "my notation", but you don't seem to have any idea what that is. If the notation above had been suggested by a third party, I would have argued against it.
Please, Toby, I get the impression you are taking this a bit too personally. I'm not criticizing your notation per se, I'm criticizing the idea of having two separate markups for variables and more complex math expressions, as opposed to just one for math expressions. Wheter you want to allow only $$x$$<sub>$$y$$</sub> or also $$x<sub>y</sub>$$ is not really relevant for that question; the arguments stay the same.
.. let <var>v</var><sub>1</sub>, ..., <var>v</var><sub><var>n</var></sub> be a finite list ..
This is what I write now, and the HTML that we should produce.
Says who? I don't agree, even apart from the question whether we should support <var> at all (<var> was not included in HTML to write mathematical variables), but since it is not relevant for this discussion I'm going to save that for later.
I didn't think that that was a controversial statement anymore; the only controversy being if the distinction was important enough.
I don't remember any discussion about, assuming that we should use <var>, how <var> should be used with variables with subscripts. But again, IMO this is all besides the point so I'll be happy to discuss this with you in another discussion when I have some more time. Right now I'd like to limit this dicussion to the question at hand.
-- Jan Hidders