On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 06:42:50PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:

Jan Hidders wrote:

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Toby Bartels wrote:

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LaTeX is hardly more easy for a technophobe to learn than HTML, and we don't want them to think that they can't edit a math expression without learning LaTeX.

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Since all math will probably then be rewrittin in TeX anyway, that will be the situation anyhow.

That's exactly the situation that I want to avoid! Why *shouldn't* it be easy to edit a math expression without knowing LaTeX? That's the case now; you only need to know '' or <var> (depending on whether I've edited the page significanlty or not, and even this will become easier if we encode <var> as $$ or such). I'm all for a system that makes complicated math easier to edit (and easier to get right in the first place), but not at the expense of the simple math that is the majority.

Note that I was talking about math *expressions* and not about simple variable names! For simple variable names the required knowledge of LaTeX is going to be near zero. I would even argue that always using the TeX markup makes things simpeler there. An example in your notation:

.. let $$v₁$$, ..., $$v_n$$ be a finite list ..

and in mine:

.. let [$v_1$], ..., [$v_n$] be a finite list ..

Note that all that I'm arguing here is that we have one markup for math and not two (one for <var> and one for LaTeX). Whether we output the expression in question as <var>, MathML or a PNG could be decided by the script on the basis of the browser and the contents of the expression.

Deal?

-- Jan Hidders