FW: "First Ark to Alpha Centauri" - the Screenplay!

In article <gFDktOMRTvtBFwC+@merlyn.demon.co.uk>, Dr John Stockton wrote:
> I never have understood why HTML/Web, being started at CERN, did not /ab
> initio/ have a representation for maths symbols, including Greeks, in
> which case earlier browsers would have implemented them.
>
Dunno in detail, but considering the timescale, I'd guess that most
of their mathematical output was already going around as either TeX code
or as the resultant image-like files, and they could safely assume that
anyone with complex mark-up requirements would have access to, and be
familiar with the use of, the relevant programming languages. (Remember
how TeX came about? Wirth, of Pascal infamy, was writing his "Art of
Programming" /magnum opus/ and became dissatisfied with the poor state of
current document processing and printing tools, so he took several years
on a tangent and created TeX. This was, broadly, contemporaneous with the
start of Postscript and it's proselytisation by Adobe. Both TeX and
Postscript are programming languages.) So, original HTML had mark-up for
presenting source code cleanly (<pre>...</pre>) without any interleaved
presentational tags which could confuse a copy'n'paste recompilation. But
it did not have an interface for launching other code processors - they
came with NetScape's implementation of the "plug-in" architecture IIRC.
Have you considered presenting your material as PDFs? The reader
technology is pretty ubiquitous, and it has the necessary layout
capabilities. There are a sufficiency of Free (and free!) tools for
producing PDFs these days. (I personally install a "fake" colour laser
PostScript printer on a FILE: port, then use a paid-for version of
Ghostscript to convert the .PS file to a .PDF file. But the free version
is just as effective.)

Hmmm, 2nd thoughts ... /ab initio/ ? Well, HTML was built as an
implementation of a SGML-compliant scheme, which may have constrained it
to use the then common 8-bit ASCII character encoding forms. Maybe it
didn't have that freedom available at the time of birth?

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233

Dr John Stockton wrote:

> I never have understood why HTML/Web, being started at CERN, did not /ab
> initio/ have a representation for maths symbols, including Greeks, in
> which case earlier browsers would have implemented them.

Because HTML was really never intended for the widespread use that it
has received. It was designed as a simple method to create marked up
text and share it with others who could add their own marked up text and
so on. Its booming popularity wasn't expected or planned, as evidenced
by the fact that it didn't really get used for the purpose for which it
was intended.

As for why mathematical markup specifically didn't show up, it's
probably because the original intended goal didn't really have anything
to do with mathematics. Adding markup for mathematics takes a lot of
work both in design and implementation, and isn't the type of thing
you'd add unless that was specifically the intent of the markup
language. HTML wasn't intended to deal mostly with mathematics, so
that's why it doesn't have it.

Other mathematical markup systems exist, like MathML (a variety of XML),
which are gaining in popularity (MathML support exists out of the box in
Mozilla).

--
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San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
Women are equal because they are not different any more.
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