[uf-new] an equation/MathML/TeX microformat?

[Christopher St John]

On 10/26/07, Paul Topping <pault at dessci.com> wrote:
> The problem has nothing to do with improving display. As I said, that
> will be via an image such as a GIF or PNG. The microformat is solely for
> the purpose of associating a MathML or TeX representation with the
> image. As with other microformats, normal HTML content is what the user
> sees while software sees structured, useful data.
>

To restate the hopefully obvious, just in case:

You just want to say "this png image of an equation you're looking at
is associated with the (MathML | TeX | Etc) ( at the end of this link | embedded
here in the document)"

How would you do it now, without microformats? Something along the
lines of:

 <a href="some_mathml.xml"><img src="some_math.png"></a>

with maybe a "class" or "rel" or something in there to tie them together
a bit tighter?

Would "the rendering fallback for this MathML is this png image" get you
the same effect? In which case you're maybe looking at the standard
<object> tag mechanism, but that gets you some (hopefully fading)
issues on certain browsers. But do the semantics of <object> fallbacks
match what you want to do?

Have you read through the existing microformats in detail checking to
see how similiar sorts of problems have been solved before? Not sure if
there's anything exactly applicable, but it's probably worth a shot.

-cks

-- 
Christopher St. John
http://artofsystems.blogspot.com