> I suppose that there may be too few of us for whom a lack of MathML > makes a > difference to constitute a “market” to be worth ubiquitous > implementation. How > does www.backspaces.net handle mathematical representations?
Hi Ross, good to hear an interesting struggle on this topic. Maybe we should start an archive on the "Math as a second class citizen on the Web" topic! :) I don't have mathematical notation on backspaces.net yet. We've been discussing how to do it and naturally MathML is one of the candidates. MathML does require users to soup up their browsers by adding a plug- in and/or getting get a set of new fonts. There are some annoyances as well, such as FireFox complaining that CMSY10 CMEX10 are not installed when the Mathematica suite from MIT *is* installed (and handles all the characters needed, I think!). So getting MathML working, even if your browser supports it, can be tricky. And naturaly, some browsers do not handle MathML yet. Safari, and WebKit upon which it is built, apparently does not. http://lists.apple.com/archives/webcore-dev/2005/Jun/msg00010.html Wikipedia, which has an extensive mathematics section, does not use MathML, alas. It uses images instead, a common practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics Here's an interesting article on Math support in HTML and includes a fairly complete overview of the problem space: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/ Note that MathML is only one of many and is considered weak. The author says, for example: "If you ask me, the language hopelessly mixes structure and appearance." He does, however, point to a good pro-MathML article: http://www.irt.org/articles/js081/index.htm Carl pointed me to an excellent site, The N-Category Cafe, which makes good use of MathML: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/ There are a few sites that do not use MathML, but do a reasonable job of building equations via HTML features like tables, sub, super, font, and so on. Here's a stunt that uses fixed pitch fonts with LaTeX inspired syntax: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/maths.html This is fairly old and presumably uses a preprocessor to implement the <MATH></MATH> tag, converting the LaTeX to <pre></pre> fixed pitch font usage. Here is a similar discussion on ASCII Math notation: http://mathforum.org/typesetting/code.example.html Finally, Karl's Calculus uses an interesting set of HTML and email stunts: http://www.karlscalculus.org/notation.html -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net On Dec 27, 2006, at 7:14 AM, Ross Goeres wrote: > > [snip] >> I think Barbie summed it up best: "Math is hard." >> >> Even most people who are good with computers find math hard. >> There are >> many programmers who have trouble thinking in recursive/dynamic >> programming terms, or who have trouble with the sort of simple 3D >> vector >> math found in games. As such, searching for exponentials, or putting >> them on the web, just doesn't come up that often. If it did, it >> would >> be a bigger part of HTML/wiki/whatever. > [snip] > > The lack of a consistent mathematical representation for search > engines > recently has hampered my ability to find references to the fact > that taking the > arithmetic mean of ratios is a bad idea. In turn, someone trying to > independently find references that support my theories of which of > the infinite > number of means is applicable in a given situation is going to run > into the > same problem. This is only one example of the aggravation I > experience from > the growing gap between computation and mathematics. > > The separation of computer “science” from mathematics is what > prompted Norbert > Weiner to remark that computation is about insight, not numbers. The > ASCII-only entry into this e-mail limits how I can represent the > following > examples: > > It is unfortunate that the factorial function is used as an example of > recursion because the integer stopping condition leads many (if not > most) > computer scientists to labor under the misconception that the > argument must be > an integer; e.g. some so-called “scientific” calculators issue an > error message > for 5.3! because the designers/programmers/engineers did not know > that n! = > Gamma(n+1), so 5.3! = Gamma(6.3). Many of these same “scientific” > calculators > issue error messages instead of calculating sqrt(-1)^sqrt(-1) -– a > “real” > number, BTW. > > I suppose that there may be too few of us for whom a lack of MathML > makes a > difference to constitute a “market” to be worth ubiquitous > implementation. How > does www.backspaces.net handle mathematical representations? > > --Ross > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
