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Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: hyperdoc


From: root
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: hyperdoc
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 20:40:22 -0500

> Can you elaborate on "full of buggy corner cases"?  I have no argument
> with "large" and "slow".

I posted a whole bunch of them on the JDOM mailing list but I'm no
longer at Worldcom and have completely removed all traces of XML from 
every possible file everywhere. It was a pleasant task :-)

> I do not believe that making images out of equations is a horrible way
> to go, for the long term.  As has been pointed out, it's impossible to
> change the font size, violates many rules of web accessability, printing
> looks terrible, and it's in general impossible to get fonts that look
> the same as the images.

Here's a subtle point.... if you are aware of what you do when you 
read math(s) texts, physics texts, etc you'll find that equations,
once you understand them, are actually just icons for you. for instance

  E = m c^2

is almost certainly not something you actually think about once you
understand it. It has become an 'icon' that gets used to remind you
of all of the associations. The only time I actually read and parse
an equation is the first time I'm trying to understand it. Even then
I find that I'm doing algebra in my head to convince myself that the
equation has been correctly derived, not working with the semantics.

This point came up during my last discussion of the crystal project.
Almost all of the actual semantics of an equation is NOT contained
in the equation but in the surrounding text. 

Tim




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