On Friday 02 August 2013 09:06 PM, Delirium wrote:
On 7/22/13 2:53 AM, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
> 2) TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be lost.
>
> "Native" content (e.g. <maction> or even subexpression links) has no
> counterpart in TeX. Conservative extensions of TeX can easily enable
> this
> kind of content but backward compatibility will be lost.
>
>
If this means MathML as the canonical format, i.e. people write MathML
into articles directly, rather than it just being an output/rendering
format, that gives me moderate worry:
1. From the perspective of being able to repurpose Wikipedia articles
outside of a web context, TeX-format equations are nice for articles in the
math/science sphere, since TeX-based publishing workflows are common in
math/science, and equations are particularly tedious and error-prone to
convert by hand, if that would end up necessary. Admittedly, in some
workflows there's no real difference: you can import both MathML and TeX
equations into MS Word with appropriate plugins (I haven't looked into
whether the two import paths differ on compatibility). Perhaps as
HTML-based print workflows improve this will drop off as an issue, but
right now only a smallish proportion of people are using workflows based on
something like PrinceXML, and the free-software alternatives to PrinceXML
are further behind.
2. From a wikitext-readability perspective, TeX-format equations are the
de-facto standard way of ASCII-fying equations, e.g. in plaintext emails,
while MathML isn't written in a syntax any humans normally write. So using
TeX as our underlying representation makes equations possible to edit in
text form, at least for people who already professionally work in areas
where that's common, while MathML equations virtually require a visual
editor (unless the idea is to use something like ASCIIMathML?).
What??!!?? sorry I didn't get a thing from this. :-)
Current scenario is: In our current Math extension, textvc is simply
unable to generate equations in png except Latin languages. Also Mathjax is
heavily client dependent (Unsupportably dependent) and has its own serious
bugs.
I read Peter's point 2 as discussing the possible "native" use of MathML
tags, i.e. permitting people to write MathML into articles, rather than
only using MathML as an alternate rendering path for texvc/MathJax/etc. If
MathML is a render-only target, then "TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be
lost" doesn't seem like it could be an issue. So unless I'm totally
misreading, I took the discussion to be about allowing MathML in articles,
which could break TeX compatibility since not all MathML tags can be
rendered back into TeX equivalents. The two points above are my two
concerns w.r.t. that suggestion. Am I misreading the suggestion entirely?
-Mark
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