On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 07:28:29PM +0200, Jan Hidders wrote:
On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 09:05:53AM -0700, lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
Formulas should be seen as "inclusions", so I prefer the [[math: syntax overall.
I believe that if you would ask those that type a lot of mathematics (I have typed some, but not very much) they would prefer the short markup.
I'm not sure which to prefer yet:
- $\sum_{i=1}$ and $$\sum_{i=1}$$ render to different images in TeX, for a good reason: keep lines with inline math as small as possible. [[math: ]]-Syntax currently renders everything in $$ ... $$ but displays it inline. So to get a display-formula you would have to do something like
:[[math:\sum_{i=1}]]
which is not realy a display formula, since the HTML generated is a <BLOCKQUOTE> and not a <CENTER> of the formula,
- The namespace "math" makes it easy for the casual reader of the source to recognize that the character garbage to follow has something to do with mathematical markup. This schema can easily be expanded to provide more than just math markup, e.g. something like
[[barchart:(1999,37) (2000,45) (2001,60)]] which would fit perfectly into [[image:, [[media:, [[math: ...
- This misuse of namespaces does not look very 'wiki'. $ ... $ and $$ ... $$ look more similar to ''...'' and '''...'''.
The software should look at the formula inside the brackets, and choose how to output it. In particular, if it detects Mozilla it should output MATHML instead of calling TeX.
That would be really great because on my mozilla the set-up of planetmath is rendered worse than Konquerer and IE.
I just took a look at MathML. May I assume that we are not wanting to write MathML to enter formulas instead of something TeXish?
For those not familiar with MathML:
To render the formula $ (a+b)^2 $ you may take two different approaches in MathML. Either describing the layout:
<msup> <mfenced> <mi>a</mi> <mo>+</mo> <mi>b</mi> </mfenced> <mn>2</mn> </msup>
or descriping the content:
<apply> <power/> <apply> <plus/> <ci>a</ci> <ci>b</ci> </apply> <cn>2</cn> </apply>
Awfull, isn't it?
Is there some efficient way to render LaTeX-formulas into MathML? I just found some XSLT to render MathML into LaTeX, but not vice versa.
Regards,
JeLuF