On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 01:13:11AM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 22:12, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 02:50:24AM +0100, Tomasz
Wegrzanowski wrote:
>How to integrate it with Wikipedia script ?
>
>Wikipedia script when rendering should find all <math>.*</math> in
markup,
>call this program (which is very fast if images are already rendered)
>and get info provided by it to render a page. I'm not even sure what should
>that program return.
We would be best served by not duplicating the efforts of
http://planetmath.org, a GFDL math encyclopedia.
I recommend that Wikipedia either 1) not use Tex-graphics, and stick to
what can be done with plain-jane wiki/HTML, or 2) integrate efforts with
planetmath.org.
Neither of these two solutions would work well, nor would "upload pngs".
First, math in HTML is way too ugly. Even things so simple as fractions
and integrals are impossible to render well.
Second, if we want to export Wikipedia to different formats, in particular dict,
Wikipedia markup model will have to change from "parse fragments you understand
leave everything else" to "parse everything, if you don't understand
something
then it is not markup". This is good step in this direction - contributors will
be able to use more powerful markup and it will be renderable as plain text too.
Third,
planetmath.org is TeX-only math-only project and not a Wiki, so technically
it is very different, and we need special markup for other purposes like chemistry
too.
Oh, and fourth:
* <math>.*</math> is much easier for parsers to live with than [[math:.*]],
as `]]' is much more likely to happen in equations than `</math>',
* it can be easily extended to different math syntax <math syntax=foo></math>
(TeX syntax is very good, but many people don't know it)
* and `> <' are visually more delimiters-like than [[math: ]].
* this isn't a link, it's markup.
So i prefer <math></math> to [[math: ]]