Re: Mozilla mathml project to be interred

Apologies, Justus, but I think you missed my point.
I am not arguing for any dilution of mathml, just the opposite. I am
arguing for additional tag standards, either as a superset to mathml
or to XHTML that would allow the tagging of text expression for
parsers.
Likewise I am not arguing that FF do it all, merely that the extension
architecture combined withsuch a tag provides the transparency and
universality that is needed; ie parsers for text syntax can be added
and turned on and off.

Devils advocate wise, mathml is a w3c standard and we can see the
impact that has had on Microsoft and webkit....  Wolfram is not going
to abandon mathematicas syntax and the same applies to
thosecomfortable with maxima or any other syntax.....  The problem is
that the paradigm of web content provider vs consumer breaks down with
"web 2.0" and will arguably disappear as web service takes over
webinteraction (web 3.0). If I amcomfortable using asciimath
ingooglegroups and you arecomfortable with maxima, why shouldn't we
bothbe able to use the syntax we arecomfortable with, having our
browsers adjust?

I think our real choice is between browser based or reliance on 3rd
party servers (such as WA, googlechartapi, or even mathtran or
mimetex) and sitting offline reading a file via my browser why
shouldn't I expect what is imminently possible?



On Oct 6, 8:18 am, [email protected] wrote:
> net-buoy <[email protected]> wrote on Mon, 5 Oct 2009 14:43:04 -0700
> (PDT):
>
> > if we want mathematics notation to be transparent and universal, we
> > can't always expect that the user has a server side tex installation
> > to rely on..... and what guarantee that every web 2.0 app will employ
> > the same server side technology?  So, while I don't want to see
> > Firefox become a huge juggernaut, I would love to see firefox be able
> > to transparently parse tags from any of a half a dozen different text
> > syntax into MathML for display.....  which argues client, not server
> > side, parsing and display....
>
> I humbly but strongly disagree.  This is an example of how the 'net has
> been going the wrong way: Instead of a few, clean specs we have a
> proliferation of competing technologies, many proprietary, that are
> supported to various degrees by different platforms.  Instead of the
> one-markup-fits-all dream behind the separation of content from
> rendering, most Web pages are highly platform specific. Expecting
> Mozilla to support different math content formats would go down the same
> road, making things worse.
>
> MathML is *the* format for marking up math. If it falls short, let's
> improve it. May all browsers do their best to implement it.
>
> How MathML is generated is none of Mozilla's business.  There's a dozen
> ways to do it. The choice is on the content creator's side, and this is
> a good thing.
>
> Let's keep these two separate: The server does its best to produce clean
> markup, and the client does its best to produce a clean rendering from
> this markup. The cleaner the set of markups to support by either side,
> the better for everyone.
>
> Justus