On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 11:08 +0100, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
Jonathan Cast wrote:
NB: This example is *precisely* why I will never adopt MathML as an authoring format. Bowing and scraping at the alter of W3C is not worth using such a terrible syntax, not ever.
(Indented, that's
<math> <mrow> <msup> <mi>x</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> <mo>+</mo> <mrow> <mn>4</mn> <mo></mo> <mi>x</mi> </mrow> <mo>+</mo> <mn>4</mn> </mrow> </math>
Which is still unforgivably horrible. I *think* it's trying to say $x^2 + 4x + 4$, but I'm not confident even of that.
Yeah, MathML looks like a machine-only format to me, begging the question why they don't use a more compact format.
I'm also unconvinced it's actually easier to parse than $x^2 + 4x + 4$.)
While parsing is a solved problem in theory, a lot of people use some regular expression kludges or similar atrocities in practice.
Yeah, we even seem to have adopted one of their syntaxen [markdown].
Writing a proper parser is too complicated if your language doesn't have parser combinators. :)
Haddock, I believe, is written in a language that does. If MathML output is desired at some point (e.g., if browsers start doing better at rendering it than at rendering images with TeX source-code alt-texts :) the I think Haddock will still be capable of handling a reasonable input language. jcc