Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/28/74 11:59

Scripsit Toby Inkster:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> Actually, it's fairly simple and natural, if you accept a
>> presentation where you use, say, sqrt(foo) to denote the square root
>> of foo
>
> This would certainly not be the usual way a mathematician would
> represent a square root;

Mathematicians, like everyone else, need to adapt their notations to various
possibilities and limitations. They may even need to use plain ASCII text
and to find various special and even ad hoc notations. (I'll skip the issue
that real mathematicians seldom use square roots. Real mathematicians live
in abstract spaces and seldom use numbers or specific algebraic functions.
;-) )

Compared with all the compromises and modifications that are so often
needed, using sqrt(...) is hardly a big deal. You might alternatively
represent the square root as a power, (...)^½, which is actually
preferred to the radix expression by many.

> - - I maintain that for complex formulae, HTML
> doesn't cut it.

That was never under dispute. But most of the formulas that people use are
not complex formulas (in either meaning of the word). The original poster of
this thread was asked to clarify what he meant, but unless I have missed
something, we still have no idea of that.

> The non-presentational parts of MathML are good,

and as useless as MathML as a whole. MathML is broken by design, since it
hopelessly mixes structure and presentation in an unprecedented manner. 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.

> 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.

Many web pages use images excessively for mathematical expressions, even
e.g. for simple variables with subscripts in running text. 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.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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