On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 08:46 -0700, Paul Topping wrote: > Perhaps I should come at this from a slightly different angle.
Thanks for the second explanation. I've also just found your helpful earlier reply, which I'm afraid I missed earlier, where you discuss copying TeX/MathML data out of webpages and into MathML applications as the main deliverable. So would this be a fair outline of your goals? 1. Images are used to display equations in an HTML document. 2. The alternative text for the image is human-readable. 3. Latex/MathML data is associated with the equation image. 4. The Latex/MathML data is normally invisible. 5. The Latex/MathML data is inline in the HTML master document, not in separate resource(s). 6. The user can discover and copy the data to the clipboard. 7. No browser add-on is required to discover and copy the data. 8. Works with all mainstream (by which I mean "A-grade" as defined by http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/) browsers. These goals are tricky since browsers tend to focus on allowing users to manipulate and copy visible not invisible data. And microformats tend to rely on browser add-ons like the Operator toolbar to enable users to extract data structured by microformats. So it seems to me that the big question is this: what invisible data /do/ browsers allow easy access to? All browsers seem to provide access to anchor URIs, and the resources they reference. Christopher St John already suggested: <a href="some_mathml.xml"><img src="some_math.png"></a> In that scenario, users could right click on the equation image, download a MathML file to their Desktop, and then open the MathML file in their MathML software. Perhaps in some cases they could even drag the anchor and drop the URI directly onto their MathML software. If the MathML software you have in mind can actually process a URI, rather than relying on browsers to download the resource for it, then it might be possible to use data URIs or reference fragments of a MathML document full of equations. Then users could right-click on the anchors, copy the URIs to the clipboard, and paste them into their MathML software. I'm guessing that MathML software can't be counted on to be able to open URIs, in which case Christopher St John's solution would probably be more practical. One of your objections was: > What you suggest is close to what I'm looking for but lacks > declaration > of the kind of data the image/linked data bundle represents. Software > working with the page would have to fetch the linked-to MathML or TeX > and examine it to know it was an equation. As I understand it, what a > microformat does is more than just hold the data, it declares a > datatype. > That certainly sounds like something microformats could help with. :) At the very crudest: <span class="hequation"><a rel="equation" href="your-equation.xml" type="application/xhtml+xml"><img alt="energy equals mass times velocity squared" src="your-equation.png"></a></span> Where the equation makes for too long or complex an alt, alt could briefly describe the equation and longdesc could be used to point to a document containing a full alternative (your-equation.html). If you need to provide both MathML /and/ TeX versions you'd probably need to provide little icons and hequation could scale to do that: <span class="hequation"><img alt="energy equals mass times velocity squared" src="your-equation.png"> (<a rel="equation" href="your-equation.xml" type="application/xhtml+xml"><img href="mathml.gif" alt="MathML for equation 5" title="MathML version"></a>, <a href="your-equation.tex" type="text/tex"><img href="mathml.gif" alt="TeX for equation 5" title="TeX version"></a>)</span> Such a microformat could also be the basis of online tools that look for hequation anchors, extract all the equations from a URI or uploaded document, and make a DL providing the MathML and TeX CODE blocks for each IMG. Except for the possibility of using data URIs, this suggestion doesn't meet Goal 5 ("The Latex/MathML data is inline in the HTML master document, not in separate resource(s)"). But it does meet the other goals I attempted to itemize. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
