--- Michael Reimpell <M.Reimpell@tu-bs.de> wrote:
>
> > You can only convey --at best-- the intersection of information
> content
> > between CAS-1 and CAS-2 and MathML by using MathML.
>
> But isn't this the best we can do without doing anything actively
> with an import/export filter?
Yes, but I don't see how this best is terribly useful. Most of the
time information loss suffered in such a transfer is not a matter that
can be dismissed.
Maybe you can provide an example of where you think this is useful?
> > MathML is currently a way of defining a display.
> > For simple things this works. If everyone's browser
> > supports MathML display (like current Netscape), then
> > MathML display is ok, but for small expressions only.
>
> Sorry, but XML - and therefore MathML - has nothing to do with
> display! XML describes structure and content and MathML is supposed
> to be a common way
> to do this for mathematical content.
Key word - "supposed to be." MathML is currently only a good solution
for displaying documents in browsers. I don't think it's terribly well
suited to handling everything that Maxima can dish out - at the least,
you'd have a tremendous amount of work to do to make sure everything
came out sensibly. My guess is it's one of those problems where the
basic steps are easy but the next ones are very definitely not.
> > MathML may be useful, but it is not likely to be a really
> > good total solution.
>
> An XML interface to the Maxima engine really is the best solution!
As a way to define a storage format for Maxima notebooks maybe. I
seriously doubt we can natively use anything that a web brower can
display.
> The fact that, at the moment, most web browsers can't display a
> certain document doesn't mean the way of describing the document is
> not a good concept.
Not as long as you think most browsers eventually will. But that is
still only compelling as an argument to have a MathML export option
from Maxima. Not to use MathML for notebook storage. That introduces
a complexity that is neither necessary nor desirable. XML might serve
to identify what various statements in a notebook file are, but using
MathML for the actual mathematics is unnecessary.
> MathML provides a ready to use DTD and we can easily extend this DTD
> to our needs without having to reinvent the wheel at all places:
> display, input, file handling. Also, it should be more than easy to
> convert the lisp tree representation of the current output to an
> XML tree. And by letting the input already be in a tree structure
> parsing should become really simple. There is no need at all to
> convert the maxima internal representation, we just need
> input and output filters!
But why do we want to do notebooks this way?? If you want to use a
MathML based widget in an interface design, use Maxima's internal
MathML conversion and feed MathML to the interface that way. There is
no earthly reason to use it in the notebook storage, since it leaves
text based editors high and dry. Never mind the problems of completely
representing all the information you would want to store in MathML.
CY
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