[Om3] target K14 for reading content-math spec any realistic?

[Chris Rowley]

Michael and Paul wrote --

> > The <Description> elements should be self-contained and understandable
> > for K-14 literates. The rest of the CDs will give more meaning, if the
> > CD author can be bothered to write it down. As such, the
> > interoperability question discussed below are at the FMP level (i.e.  
> > in
> > the rest of the CD) and in particular not in Chapter 4 of the  
> > MathML3 spec.
> 
> So you believe there is a possibility to write the descriptions that  
> will sip into chapter 4 readable by a "K14-literate"?
> Can you elaborate here, does it mean a starting student at a  
> university in Europe or elsewhere?

My understanding of this would be:

That the mathematical ideas/words in the description should mostly be
understandable by most people who have both:

-- successfully completed such a mathematical training (although they may
have to go and look in wikipedia for some bits that they did not cover
or have forgotten);

-- and still have some interest in the maths and the motivation to
understand the descriptions.

[I am fairly sure that in at least one European country 2 does not
apply to most starting maths students and maybe not 1!]

Opinion: I think that this class of people must be a superset of this class: of

-- engineers who would normally be expected to need to understand the
maths in these descriptions.

> As per my first mail in this thread, you can see I doubt of that.
> 
> "a minimal wording for interoperability between expected processors  
> that can be read by normal engineers with some time to read extra  
> references"
> is the best I can suggest as a description of the descriptions... it  
> is not "k14-readable' to my taste!

@Michael: does your informal definition agree with mine?

@Doubting Paul: does this help?


chris