On 5/5/2013 9:46 PM, Benoit Jacob wrote:
I am still waiting for the rebuttal of my arguments, in the original email in this thread, about how TeX is strictly better than MathML for the particular task of representing equations. As far as I can see, MathML's only inherent claim to existence is "it's XML", and being XML stopped being a relevant selling point for a Web spec many years ago (or else we'd be stuck with XHTML)
Don't be quick to dismiss the utility of XML. The problem of XHTML, as I understand it, was that the XHTML2 spec ignored the needs of its would-be users and designed stuff that was untenable. XHTML as in "a representation of the HTML DOM in XML syntax" isn't a bad idea to me. Note that I'm really defining XML here as "the basic representation format of HTML."
In this case, I think the XML nature of MathML actually works to its benefit: it uses the same basic framework and "look and feel" as HTML, so you can very easily insert arbitrary HTML into your equation. A TeX-like language would have to invent awkward wrappers for this same functionality, like \html{<b>I can insert arbitrary HTML!</b>}. It also creates its own implicit DOM structure for manipulation, and provides very natural launchpads for extra styling or scripting.
-- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
