On 5/6/2013 2:12 PM, Benoit Jacob wrote:
How many specific domains will want to have their own domain-specific markup language next? Chemistry? Biology? Electronics? Music? Flow charts? Calligraphy?
MathML specifies mathematical formulae, which is not domain-specific, and is itself a building block for other fields as well. Looking at the other fields: Chemical formulas of course can use MathML, and drawing chemical structures is best built on SVG. Note that even practitioners in the field are used to basically building these structures with tools like ChemDraw, which can be thought of as a specialized SVG tool. I don't know what biology can specify, but I don't think there's much that they couldn't solve without basic 2D and 3D graphics. Electronics' circuit diagrams are easily just a set of macros on top of SVG, as are music and flow charts.
I haven't read the source code of MathJAX, but the fact that it isn't a straight TeX-to-HTML one-pass converter is to me a good sign that MathML expresses stuff that is not reliably expressible in HTML.
I suspect that when people start asking for that, we'll quickly have to start saying "no", and at that point, the exception made for math will seem unjustified.
If no one's asking for the other things, then it's not an issue. -- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
