On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 06:42:50PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
Jan Hidders wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>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.
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 $$ or such).
I'm all for a system that makes complicated math easier to edit
(and easier to get right in the first place),
but not at the expense of the simple math that is the majority.
Note that I was talking about math *expressions* and not about simple
variable names! For simple variable names the required knowledge of LaTeX is
going to be near zero. I would even argue that always using the TeX markup
makes things simpeler there. An example in your notation:
.. let $$v<sub>1</sub>$$, ..., $$v<sub>n</sub>$$ 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