On Friday 02 August 2013 09:06 PM, Delirium wrote:
On 7/22/13 2:53 AM, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
- TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be lost.
"Native" content (e.g. <maction> or even subexpression links) has no counterpart in TeX. Conservative extensions of TeX can easily enable this kind of content but backward compatibility will be lost.
If this means MathML as the canonical format, i.e. people write MathML into articles directly, rather than it just being an output/rendering format, that gives me moderate worry:
- From the perspective of being able to repurpose Wikipedia articles
outside of a web context, TeX-format equations are nice for articles in the math/science sphere, since TeX-based publishing workflows are common in math/science, and equations are particularly tedious and error-prone to convert by hand, if that would end up necessary. Admittedly, in some workflows there's no real difference: you can import both MathML and TeX equations into MS Word with appropriate plugins (I haven't looked into whether the two import paths differ on compatibility). Perhaps as HTML-based print workflows improve this will drop off as an issue, but right now only a smallish proportion of people are using workflows based on something like PrinceXML, and the free-software alternatives to PrinceXML are further behind.
- From a wikitext-readability perspective, TeX-format equations are
the de-facto standard way of ASCII-fying equations, e.g. in plaintext emails, while MathML isn't written in a syntax any humans normally write. So using TeX as our underlying representation makes equations possible to edit in text form, at least for people who already professionally work in areas where that's common, while MathML equations virtually require a visual editor (unless the idea is to use something like ASCIIMathML?).
-Mark
What??!!?? sorry I didn't get a thing from this. :-)
Current scenario is: In our current Math extension, textvc is simply unable to generate equations in png except Latin languages. Also Mathjax is heavily client dependent (Unsupportably dependent) and has its own serious bugs.
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