On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:52:32PM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:51:12AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
The vote therefore has a systemic bias towards the programmers, but they are not the intended audience. Also, most of the programmers (apparently) vote on what they prefer (as opposed to what they think unsavvy people might prefer).
There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever.
I think its just the opposite. Only perl programmers would prefer so many special characters rather than words to delimit things.
Most people are familiar with html these days, so "unsavvy" people won't be frightened by <math></math>
I am a perl programmer and I disprefer [# .. #]. I could probably memorize them, but I don't really want to, and I don't believe laypersons could. If it reads "math" then it is obvious that what it is, you don't have to memorize.
Test: <movie>...</movie> Try to guess what kind of media is handled by this imaginary tag. ;-)
That's why. grin