MathML is a failed web standard

Post by t1212129 » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

conistonwater wrote: post #105

bentley wrote: post #22

It’s instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Here’s the quadratic formula: In troff, x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a In TeX, x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a} In plain Unicode, 𝑥 = (−𝑏 ± √(𝑏² − 4𝑎𝑐))⁄2𝑎 In MathML, x = − b ± b 2 − 4ac 2a MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time it’s only ever used as an interchange format, automatically…

Shouldn't the '=' and the minus and the other signs be inside , rather than , because they are binary operators, not identifiers? TeX for example, makes a clear distinction in terms of how much whitespace it would surround operators with, vs. identifiers. In any case, I suspect MathML was intended as an intermediate computer-readable representation, not something that anyone would write by hand (MathJax can compile y…

Post by magicalist » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

dginev wrote: post #85

I don't know how many of the people lamenting MathML ever came to exist are active math-on-the-web developers. I for one am dealing with third-party math equations on a daily basis and can only dream of the wonder of ubiquitous MathML support in all major browsers. The details as to why are here: http://prodg.org/blog/mathml_please/2015-09-16/MathML%20on%2... ! As things stand, math handling on the web is inconvenien…

Post by wrp » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

bentley wrote: post #22

It’s instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Here’s the quadratic formula: In troff, x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a In TeX, x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a} In plain Unicode, 𝑥 = (−𝑏 ± √(𝑏² − 4𝑎𝑐))⁄2𝑎 In MathML, x = − b ± b 2 − 4ac 2a MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time it’s only ever used as an interchange format, automatically…

Post by cpr » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #73

koolba wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah. I think that's inevitable with an XML syntax. XML is good at some things, but representing math expressions clearly is not one of them. What is XML good at? (by good I mean better than alternatives like JSON, YAML, HAML, etc) The only thing I that might qualify is a long term/archival quality document format like ODF/OOXML. The inherently embeddedable nature of XML does seem like a nice fit but it gets very b…

"What is XML good at?" (For the purposes of this post, I'm including HTML in the XML family.) XML/HTML is good when: 1. You have two dimensions of markup you want to do. That is, you have a clear distinction between what is a new "tag" and what is an attribute on that tag. If you can't almost instantly decide whether some feature you want to add works as an attribute or a tag, you probably shouldn't be in XML. 2. Alm…

Post by yepguy » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

bentley wrote: post #22

It’s instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Here’s the quadratic formula: In troff, x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a In TeX, x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a} In plain Unicode, 𝑥 = (−𝑏 ± √(𝑏² − 4𝑎𝑐))⁄2𝑎 In MathML, x = − b ± b 2 − 4ac 2a MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time it’s only ever used as an interchange format, automatically…