From: Rüdiger Koch (rkoch@rkoch.org)
Date: Wed Apr 10 2002 - 16:35:58 MDT
If Bob Mathews dislikes this so much why doesn't he simply write the
appropriate style sheets or SAX parser to transform MathML->TeX or a TeX
module that outputs MathML instead of ranting?
Or even easier: Check out
http://www.webeq.com/mathml/resources.html
and download what's needed.
-Rudiger
On Wednesday 10 April 2002 22:20, you wrote:
> I didn't realize before this that the MathML development effort completely
> sidestepped the TeX community (> 50% of the scientists)
>
> Amara
>
> ----------FWD--------------------------------------
> From: aes <siegman@stanford.edu>
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.scitech,comp.sys.mac.apps
> Subject: Re: ANN: MathPlayer is now in public beta
> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 07:32:03 -0800
>
> In article <p_qm8.54$Hk3.60136@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
>
> "Bob Mathews" <bobm@mathtype.com> wrote:
> >If you've ever tried putting technical documents on the Web,
> > you're undoubtedly familiar with the obstacles to overcome in
> > displaying it properly. Design Science has just eliminated one of
> > the few remaining hurdles. MathPlayer, our high-performance
> > MathML display engine for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser,
> > is now available for free download.
>
> <Rant mode on>
>
> It still remains IMHO a criminal act that the MathML development effort
> more or less completely ignored a long-existing, widely known, massively
> used, totally standardized, free, totally multi-platform, and technically
> superb standard for coding and displaying math on the web and anywhere else
> -- that is to say, TeX.
>
> Very large portions of the entire scientific and engineering
> community have made
> massive investments in TeX:
>
> * massive investments by individual workers in learning to use TeX as a
> syntax for expressing complex math in ASCII form, and in generating
> zillions of documents now saved as TeX source files on their hard disks;
>
> * massive investments by publishers and professional societies in setting
> up arrangements for electronic submission of documents in TeX form and in
> educating
> their authors to use these;
>
> * massive investments by software vendors in developing TeX macro packages
> along with excellent WYSIWYG and real-time implementations of TeX for
> various operating systems.
>
> In other words, TeX is both a widely known *syntax* for users, and a
> widely used
> *system* for displaying technical documents, especially math, not just
> "properly" but extraordinarily well.
>
> The developers of MathML apparently believe that all of this investment and
> all of these working systems should be scrapped, and replaced by equally
> expensive world-wide replacement investments in setting up and learning
> MathML.
>
> There are, of course, situations where old technology should be ditched and
> replaced by new and better technology. This is not, however, one of them.
> TeX is *not* an obsolete technology, that needs to be replaced; and MathML
> is not a "better" replacement (it's alleged improvements, so far as I can
> see, are neither wanted nor needed by the world-wide TeX community).
>
> If the MathML community wants to provide TeX users with simple tools,
> operable on all significant platforms, to convert TeX source files into
> MathML source files, that will at least preserve all the investment that
> individual TeX users worldwide have made in learning TeX syntax. Does the
> MathML community have any plans to do this? -- I'm not aware of them.
>
> If the XML/HTML/MathML community would put effort into developing
> straightforward browser plugins that would permit a major subset of TeX
> math syntax to be simply incorporated and then displayed within HTML
> documents, with a syntax something like
>
> <TEX> ------(TeX math coding)--------- </TEX>
>
> (where the TeX coding might be a short math expression, a single display
> equation, or a longer segment or document), then large fractions of the
> world could put their technical documents on the web without ever worrying
> about MathML.
>
> The existence of compact but excellent TeX implementations for innumerable
> operating systems ("Textures" for the Mac, for example), or of PDF plugins
> for numerous browsers -- or of MathPlayer for that matter -- makes it
> unarguable that this *could* be done. But, is it *being* done?
>
> Sorry, I can't welcome MathPlayer, however "high-performance" it may be. I
> don't believe it's what's really needed for the real underlying task.
>
> <rant mode off>
>
> A. E. SIegman
> McMurtry Professor of Engineering, Stanford University
-- Rüdiger Koch http://rkoch.org Mobile: +49-179-1101561
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:23 MST