[om] Re: comments on documents

[sal at dcs.st-and.ac.uk]

> OM can be extended by the publishing of
> content dictionaries. MathML can be altered by appeal
> to W3C.  
	[ . . . ]

> Why then OM?
> Some people don't trust W3C to do it right.
> 

Disregarding the other issues, this doesn't make sense. Getting the W3C to 
accept and publish a recommendation for a new version of MathML is a hugely 
larger undertaking than writing a Content Dictionary or two. Writing a really 
good dictionary for a large area of mathematics and getting other people to 
accept it is still a big undertaking, but at least it can be limited to one 
area of mathematics. It is also possible, easy, and often useful to write a quick 
content dictionary with just a couple of symbols in it for use in one  project. 
Indeed, in Michael Kohlhase's OMDOC work new CDs are generated dynamically for 
each "scope" in the document. In this kind of situation, OM is serving as an 
"enriched" XML, with more semantics than a plain XML tree (built-in leaf 
types, apply and bind, etc.), but this can be combined freely with use of 
standard dictionaries (the MathML compatible ones or others).

	Steve
.
-- 
Steve Linton	School of Computer Science  &
      Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra
	     University of St Andrews 	 Tel   +44 (1334) 463269
http://www-theory.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~sal	 Fax   +44 (1334) 463278   

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