[thelist] Displaying scientific and mathematical notation

joe stowaway at uklinux.net
Mon May 10 10:02:51 CDT 2004


Hi Stephen

Didn't know about the Mozilla support for MathML - that's excellent news.

The site is actually something I'm going to do partly for my own joy and 
partly as a demonstration.  In my other existence I'm a lecturer and 
like Diane in another post am appalled by the standard of interactive 
learning resources out there.

The idea is to put a lot of resources into open standard format like xml 
and cousins, and provide a number of interfaces to it to suit the user.  
Probably a relational database at the back end, and data requests will 
be processed by an application layer which generates the xml.  The 
generated xml files will be accessible by HTTP for anyone wishing to put 
them to their own use.  There will also be a front end which allows a 
user to choose how they want their data - rendered to html, or an 
interactive Flash/Shockwave based interface.  Hence the application 
layer will be split into two - one to determine what kind of user agent 
wants the data and send appropriate info back, and one to interact with 
the db.  Once the show is one the road, I might even open parts of it up 
as a wiki.

The situation, therefore, is that I want to build it for an unlimited 
audience... the philosophy being that the internet should be a place 
where anyone can access any knowledge they want in the format of their 
choosing.  Some provisos being that if you want, for example, an 
interactive stochastic model of factors determining amospheric 
conditions, something like Flash or Shockwave wins hands down over HTML 
(just to stick my oar into someone else's thread for the hell of it :) )

joe


Stephen Rider wrote:

> MathML does seem to work on Mozilla/Firefox/etc., so as you are 
> targeting a rather specialized audience anyway, you might have the 
> option of instructing them to use a Mozilla-based browser for the 
> purposes of this site.
>
> Depends on the situation, of course.
>
> Steve
>
> On May 7, 2004, at 6:03 PM, Sam-I-Am wrote:
>
>>> I'm hoping to find a variation on xml (MathML?) for the data, but 
>>> still not sure exactly how to present it to a browser...
>>
>>
>> We had to look into this for a project recently. MathML is all ready 
>> for you, but the browser support for it is not.
>> Basically you'll need to make gifs...
>>
>> Unless anyone has any other suggestions?
>
>



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