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MathML: horribleMathML: horriblePosted Apr 29, 2011 3:14 UTC (Fri) by PaulTopping (guest, #74605)In reply to: MathML: horrible by n8willis Parent article: MathML, Firefox, and Firemath
In comparing TeX to MathML it is easy to make a category error. TeX is a human input language. In other words, it was designed to be typed by humans. MathML is a computer representation and was intended as an internal representation and not something for mere mortals to type. Just as RTF (Rich Text Format) is text and can be typed, it is not intended to be typed. RTF and all XML languages, even HTML, are not really designed to be input languages. That is not their forte.
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MathML: horrible Posted May 4, 2011 15:56 UTC (Wed) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
I don't buy that. If MathML was intended to be read only by computers then a proper design would care about efficiency and MathML would be coded in some kind of portable binary format, like Java code. If MathML was designed to be read by some humans, then it is absurd to invent a hard to read notation just to simplify the MathML parser and interpreter.
MathML: horrible Posted May 12, 2011 20:05 UTC (Thu) by PaulTopping (guest, #74605) [Link]
You should read some of the more general introductions to XML. Wikipedia might be a good start. These days with fast computers and connections, but expensive software development, we choose to represent data in XML so that common software tools can be used to operate on them. XML is a text format for ease of interchange and ease of development.
For those that want speed, you can zip XML and they get really compact. This is what Microsoft's .docx format does. The W3C is also working on a compression scheme that is specific to XML that will probably do even better than zip compression. What is cool about it is that all XML-based file formats will take advantage of it. All XML tools will be updated to deal with the compression/decompression and will work on all those formats.
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