From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Apr 10 2002 - 14:20:28 MDT
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
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential." Sherlock Holmes (The Adventure of the Red Circle)
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