Currently, the de facto standard (and it is a good one!) is the Tex and
LaTex solution. Eric has a very nice description of what this does.
Unfortunately, the Latex to html converters do a fairly poor job at
tranferring the information content, as described above since the
equations are made into gif images. Since math articles tend to have
LOTS of symbols and equations, the html pages are rife with images that
really slow down the loading of the page (and you can't turn off images
to help!).
To me, the real downfall with this image substitution procedure is a
loss of tagged information. Math equations should be marked up (tagged)
so that there is meta data information available for page layout. Here
is a trivial example of what this means, but is easy to understand and
then extrapolate from. In html, we tag headers and paragraphs and other
text information. Our browser then uses these tags to lay out the page,
adjusting the font, point size, and style. If you place a math equation
into a document as a static image, then the user cannot change the point
size. The extension is that these math object have content and
semantical character that is all lost when one does not use tags.
Well, the solution is first a standard set of math tags. Then we need
MathML aware browers. More likely, we will get a math markup as XML
(extensible markup language) and then someone/some company will provide
the browser extension to deal appropriately with this. When will this
come? Who knows, but a short story might suffice. About 2 years ago I
was speaking with a Netscape staffer and asked him when support for
greek characters and math will come. He replied that netscape had done a
market study of Greece and decided that the market was too small to be
concerned with.
I do have a possible solution here, though since I do not use Tex or
LaTex I cannot vouch for this actually doing what the promo piece says
it does. IBM has created a netscape plugin that will image Tex - it is
called techexplorer. The plugin is avaialble for AIX 4.1, Windows 95/ NT
and Sun Solaris 2.5. Further info and to download for free:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/formula/techexplorer
If anyone does use this, I would appreciate some comments.
Steve
-- Steven Bachrach Department of Chemistry Northern Illinois University DeKalb, Il 60115 Phone: (815)753-6863 smb@smb.chem.niu.edu Fax: (815)753-4802