Am Donnerstag, 8. April 2004 08:26 schrieb Peter Gervai:
On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 12:57:50AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
David Friedland wrote:
Timwi wrote:
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. Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than <math>.
The reason that non-savvy users might prefer <math>x^2</math> is that it requires understanding the concept of markup, a concept which most people learn in the context of HTML, and the very first thing you learn when you attempt to learn HTML is that things are enclosed in things that look like <something> </something>.
Which is also why we use <b>...</b> instead of ''', <a> instead of [[...]], <li> instead of *, etc.?
If we would use math as often as ''this'' then I would definitely vote against long tags. But we use them rarely, and it's good that they're more descriptive that way. Often used contructs shall be short because we use them every day.
If we use them rarely or not depends on the article. Good math-article needs often references to math-objects by using variable-names. The clean way would be to set these variable always in math-markup and in this case we would need a short syntax for such articles.
But I guess this is the main-problem. We are writing an encyclopdia about anything and so we need markup vor anything. But markup vor anything can not be short.
--Ivo Köthnig