Slashdot Mirror
MathML 2.0 Becomes W3C Proposed Recommendation
Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page.
Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.
Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.
:-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????
I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.
If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.
This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.
Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy
clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
(and)
Finally, a way to teach terrorists about fission with web pages that make everything look correct! This is truly a great thing, praise the green bug god for this. Now to have my minions can study mathematics and chemistry as i force them to slave away scraping watch hands so that I can collect enough fissionable material!
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
The standard proposes to do lots, including:
Facilitate conversion to and from other mathematical formats, both presentational and semantic. Output formats should include
Anything which will allow input and output into Mathematica and TeX both (let alone the others) is going to not be something that you can not type directly by hand, so for this standard it would be unfair to expect that. Instead, it is important to make sure that the standard includes the important mathematical notions that will port from TeX and computer algebra systems. (to me, that means all of TeX and LaTeX except the page-layout specific features, and most of Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab...)
It may be that the standard is trying to do too much or that it would only be useful to the mathematical elite, but given the ambitious role it is clear that the standard will need to be complicated and presumably not suitable for unaided digestion or production.
See the standards page here, for the 12 line code for the expression for (a+b)^2.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Something like this would be schweet if it became widely accepted. HTML is OK for most things, but mathematical notation and things molecular diagrams in Chemistry have to be represented with image files which can, of course, be a real pain in the ass.
Our little college is looking into MathML as a possible way to give online placement tests to incoming first-year students, and I found that it required special browser plug-ins to work. So I'm guessing that a browsers like Opera, kfm, and my grandmother's TV internet appliance are just out of luck. Needless to say, I'm not very comfortable with depending on browser plug-ins for anything.
How soon is it going to be before browsers support this stuff out-of-the-box, without me having to download and install a stupid plug-in?
========
Stephen C. VanDahm
The reason there's a W3C recommendation for MathML, and not a non-proprietary vector graphics format, is because this has been a thorn in the sides of many mathematicians and scientists for years, and they've been working hard at fixing it.
I am not aware of the history on any of the vector attempts, but I do not believe that there have been as many people working on it for as long. After all, many people have their vector needs served adequately by any of the many proprietary plugins, since all they need is for people to be able to view the output; but those needing math to communicate have a much longer history of open information sharing, and need a common language.