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Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test
An anonymous reader writes "Frédéric Wang, an engineer at the MathJax project, reports that the latest nightly build of Firefox now passes the MathML Acid2 test. Screenshots in his post show a comparison with the latest nightly Chrome Canary, and it's not pretty. He writes 'Google developers forked Webkit and decided to remove from Blink all the code (including MathML) on which they don't plan to work in the short term.'"
I simply cant believe this...
MathML is a pretty important to allowing papers to be...
I suspect they were using Chrome in a Google Spreadsheet when calculating their bid for Motorola Mobility.
My many web design/development clients would disagree with you. I don't even want to recall the times I've had to tell them No for blinking things.
Unfortunately they think blinking == attention getting, whereas we think blinking == f*cking irritating.
Ask a web developer what they think about Chrome?
It is not all positive. It is buggy and has proprietary extensions similiar to something that sounded familiar in the past? Its javascript sometimes does not load on sites and its version of HTML 5 is differnent from others. HTML5test.com tests things that W3C implements a little differently or not at all.
Remember IE 6 was lean mean and standards compliant compared to the god awefull netscape 10 years ago too. Hard to believe in a place like slashdot to admit but if you go read slashdot history on the most discussed stories of all time "What keeps you on Windows from 2002" IE 6 is mentioned!
The switch to a new rendering engine is going to cause issues soon and many corporate oriented SVs and site makers will not be pleased.
http://saveie6.com/
Webkit was caught patching to specifically pass the Acid3 test.
Mathematics is one of those fields that could use some ISO standards.
There are critics of C++ that say the language is just pieces and parts hacked together. Even if that is true, mathematics takes the undisputed crown of bizarre hacked together symbols.
The symbols used in mathematics are unintelligible, inconsistent, don't even use a standard language character set and cannot be represented in a programming language.
These mathematical symbols either need to be modernized to come to a standardization or die.
What the hell? I can believe how incredibly ignorant is this comment. Do you even work with mathematics? The symbols used in mathematics are jargon to be sure, but every (non-trivial) field of endeavours has its jargon. And that jargon makes mathematics significantly easier to work with day-to-day for its practitioners.
You make it sound like mathematics deliberately chose symbols and syntax that was difficult to implement in a programming language, as if that's the pinnacle of the written form. Of course, mathematics predates programming languages by centuries if not millenia. And the symbol it uses are part of a standard language character set, just not those that has yet been popular in the (relative) young computer world. You're comparing mathematics to a single programming language. You should instead compare mathematics to every programming language combined.
Your comment makes as much sense as suggesting we should make all computer languages like COBOL. Sure, it makes the actual words more readable and standardised, but it doesn't help the layperson because the average person isn't going to read any computer languages anyway. And it hinders any computer programmer by making it more difficult and wordy to express complicated concepts.
What the hell? I can believe how incredibly ignorant is this comment. Do you even work with mathematics? The symbols used in mathematics are jargon to be sure, but every (non-trivial) field of endeavours has its jargon. And that jargon makes mathematics significantly easier to work with day-to-day for its practitioners.
You make it sound like mathematics deliberately chose symbols and syntax that was difficult to implement in a programming language, as if that's the pinnacle of the written form. Of course, mathematics predates programming languages by centuries if not millenia.
The problem is that these symbols are no longer suitable for the modern world. They were fine at the time when they were conceived, but technology has moved on and requires something better.
And the symbol it uses are part of a standard language character set, just not those that has yet been popular in the (relative) young computer world. You're comparing mathematics to a single programming language. You should instead compare mathematics to every programming language combined.
The criticism was not that the symbols are undisplayable, it is that their use is not consistent and not possible as part of a computer program, aside from very special languages which specifically cater for Math. A few attempts have been made to reconcile these (for example RPN and stack-based languages like Forth) but have not seen widespread adoption so far.
With regards to the GP, I think that the inconsistency is especially bad. For example, whether N is meant to include 0 or not often depends on whether the author thinks that the natural numbers include 0 or not (which are two totally different things). Then many authors use trigonometric functions like operators to avoid writing parentheses, but without formally specifying the binding/precedence level. So when one reads "sin^2 x*y" does that mean "(sin(x)^2)y" or "sin(x*y)^2" or "sin(sin(x))*y" or "sin(sin(x*y))"? The list goes on.
Just a note—sin^2(x) cannot be sin(sin(x)) because that is a datatype error. The input is an angle, the output is a ratio. They don't have the same domain, and hence the function cannot be iterated. Because of its utility in trig proofs, sin^2(x) was introduced as a form of syntactic sugar, much like Python's slice operators or C's array subscripts. (Although to be fair the formal notion of functions wasn't well-standardized at the time, and it actually was a unary operator when introduced.) It helps to regard sin^2 as a discrete trigonometric function and not simply a sine function being squared.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
if you want MathMl enabled in Chrome click the star in Issue 152430 to register interest
MathML is supported in IE natively (at least it is for IE 10). What makes you say otherwise? Just head on over to http://www.mathjax.org/demos/mathml-samples/ and see for yourself.
I don't have IE10 and therefore cannot tell whether it does or does not support MathML, however I just want to make sure you've seen that this page by default does not render MathML, but builds the formulas with HTML+CSS. You have to explicitly select "MathML" with the dropdown selector to see what it looks like rendered using MathML.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You just showed that you don't know enough mathematics.
The input to the sine function is not an angle, it is a real or complex number. If real, this number often (but not always!) describes some angle. If complex, it obviously won't describe an angle.
The sine function is defined as
sin x = (exp(i x) - exp(-i x)) / (2i)
where i is the imaginary number, and exp(x) is defined by the series
exp x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + ... + x^n/n! + ...
Note that, since the convergence radius of the exponential series is infinite, and the sine is just a linear combination of exponentials, the sine is defined on all complex numbers. Since it is complex-valued, sin sin x is indeed well defined for all complex numbers x.
Moreover, if you restrict the sine to real numbers (that is, only accept real numbers), you still have a well defined sin sin x, because the real sine function is also real-valued (more exactly, its values are restricted to the interval [-1,1]).
Also, the output is in general not a rational number (the only thing you could have meant with "ratio" that makes sense in this context).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.