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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 10/21/47 12:00
On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Mathematicians, like everyone else, need to adapt their notations to
> various possibilities and limitations. They may even need to use
> plain ASCII text and
[...]
Our theorists also need to discuss such things in email, and they've
become accustomed to writing (and reading) mathematical notation in
the form of latex source. Consequently they're inclined to do the
same thing in HTML. However, this is only good for a specialist
audience who is familiar with the notation.
> and as useless as MathML as a whole. MathML is broken by design,
> since it hopelessly mixes structure and presentation in an
> unprecedented manner.
That was my impression too.
> Give us the math part of the HTML 3 draft, a little polished, and
> make browsers implement it - a reasonable request -, and people will
> use it.
We had it with UdiWWW, around 10 years back. Some things don't get
better with time :-{
> > so for now, images are the most sensible option.
>
> For formulas that cannot easily be expressed in HTML and CSS, yes.
> This typically means material that we are used to seeing in some
> types of mathematical textbooks and research, and occasionally in
> physics.
You still have the fun of devising an alt text. And alt text (like
attributes in general) can't use markup. (OBJECT is much better in
this regard, provided that you make some alternative provision for
obsolete browsers, particularly MSIE).
> Many web pages use images excessively for mathematical expressions,
> even e.g. for simple variables with subscripts in running text.
This is basically what latex2html used to do. I have to admit I've
lost contact with its recent developments, but more complex
expressions will surely still be turned into images. For an
alternative view, one could look at TtH (tex-to-html converter). (But
don't get me started on the way the author uses font face=Symbol)
> Try to change the text size and see what happens. (OK, you _could_
> make the images adapt to font size via image sizing in CSS, but it
> would mean quite some extra work and care, and authors just don't do
> that. Besides, image sizing by browsers doesn't always produce
> pretty results.)
As I say, I don't know what latex2html is doing currently, but I
reckon it would be simple enough to configure it to size its images in
em units. I tried that by hand a few years back, making the natural
image size somewhat larger than I expected the final result to be
(we've discussed this topic recently on this group in a different
context), and the results were at least acceptable.
The results may not be ideal, but neither is it ideal to have images
in the running text whose size is too different from the size of the
text. So - once the decision has been made to use images - it's a
compromise, and each one is welcome to make their own choice of
compromise.
regards
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