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Steve Heaney writes:
>
>I would just like to add a voice of agreement to Marc's comments. The line
>"Too much pain for too little gain" springs to mind.
>
>My vote (for what its worth) would be to keep math separate from HTML+.
>
>This is not meant to be a provocative question, but how many users or
>potential users of WWW would it really benefit ? Perhaps this has already
>been answered on www-talk, but I have not seen a definitive answer.
Everyone here would benefit even from minimal math capabilities.
This includes myself and at least 3 staff members and
4 graduate students. Of course, asking this question in this
forum is unlikely to get very many enthusiastic responses. It appears
that the community that would take advantage of this is not
at the moment very involved in contributing to designing and
building the interfaces.
One of our projects is a discrete
mathematics information resource (going on line by the end
of the year) which includes preprint databases among other things.
I'd love to put some papers online in an html format,
though we'll probably start with one page .ps and .dvi
abstracts together with full papers in postscript.
Translation of simple latex documents is certainly an option,
though I have noticed that the mathematics papers I wrote
are very slow to load if converted with latex2html.
(Aside: and I would really like to customize much of the look
of the document---can I do that without hacking the code?)
The ability to have simple mathematics displayed by the browser
would speed up transfer times.
Manny