Am Donnerstag, 8. April 2004 08:26 schrieb Peter Gervai:
On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 12:57:50AM +0100, Timwi
wrote:
David Friedland wrote:
Timwi wrote:
There is no other way I can imagine that people
seriously prefer
<math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever.
Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than
<math>.
The reason that non-savvy users might prefer <math>x^2</math> is that it
requires understanding the concept of markup, a concept which most
people learn in the context of HTML, and the very first thing you learn
when you attempt to learn HTML is that things are enclosed in things
that look like <something> </something>.
Which is also why we use <b>...</b> instead of ''', <a>
instead of
[[...]], <li> instead of *, etc.?
If we would use math as often as ''this'' then I would definitely vote
against long tags. But we use them rarely, and it's good that they're more
descriptive that way. Often used contructs shall be short because we use
them every day.
If we use them rarely or not depends on the article. Good math-article needs
often references to math-objects by using variable-names. The clean way would
be to set these variable always in math-markup and in this case we would need
a short syntax for such articles.
But I guess this is the main-problem. We are writing an encyclopdia about
anything and so we need markup vor anything. But markup vor anything can not
be short.
--Ivo Köthnig