[thelist] Displaying scientific and mathematical notation (was: When the mix of visual appearance and meaning goes really bad)

[Sam-I-Am]

> Regarding the special cases such as taxonomical names and vectors, I'm 
> soon beginning a project which will require scientific notation and 
> equations that actually look like fractions, and not like "v = d/t". 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...
> 
> Any suggestions welcome?
> joe

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. We did investigate making a flash 
viewer for the MathML content and had some success parsing the xml 
fragment and rendering. But there's a LOT to this and not at all for the 
  faint hearted.
There are various mostly commercial plugins as I recall. My father is a 
physicist and I ran this by him at the time, and he said that for the 
stuff he used, gif images were mostly used to present the notation on 
the web, and if a page is heavy with notation, a pdf or LaTex file 
offered instead. Not good I know..

Unless anyone has any other suggestions?

Sam