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

[Paul Topping]

Yes, these are all good ideas. The web service idea is especially
intriguing though the need to service a request to get at the data
probably makes it about as performant as parsing images with JS. As to
whether education is ok with enabling JS, I think that's ok. One can do
so little in pages these days if scripting is disabled.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: microformats-new-bounces at microformats.org [mailto:microformats-
> new-bounces at microformats.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
> Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2007 12:04 PM
> To: For discussion of new microformats.
> Subject: RE: [uf-new] an equation/MathML/TeX microformat?
> 
> James Howison's idea is very neat.
> 
> I think it might probably be difficult to write cross-browser,
> performant JavaScript that parses the PNG bytes for this data, and it
> would introduce an undesirable dependency on users having JS enabled
> that may be unrealistic in educational settings. But it would probably
> be comparatively easy to write a webservice that does the same thing
and
> returns an XML representation that can be downloaded:
> 
> <span class="hequation"><a rel="equation"
> href="http://webservice.example.org/png2mathml.php?uri=http%
> 3A//images.example.com/345.png" type="application/xhtml+xml"><img
> alt="energy equals mass times velocity squared"
> src="http://images.example.com/345.png" type="image/png"></a></span>
> 
> Now you could layer some JavaScript on top of that which collects all
> the hequation IMG source URIs, rolls them up into a single request to
> the webservice, and receives back a MathML document into memory. But
I'm
> not clear how you'd like the script to expose the resulting
information
> to the end user. Intercepting attempts to copy the image to the
> clipboard would probably be problematic, both in terms of how to
achieve
> it and in terms of confusing end users. Adding items to the context
menu
> would be nice, but very hard to do with JavaScript. So adding little
> icons after each equation might be a better bet.
> 
> If developers of other MathML software could be persuaded to parse
data
> from images, that would be good. But I think it's important to have a
> link to MathML serialization within the HTML layer, given the
existence
> of multiple browsers and assistive technologies that can cope with
> MathML (at least to some degree).
> 
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
> 
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