ActiveMath
Failing to create a book discover
I have created a collection “Essai”, and I would like to create a book “discover” with items of this collection (theorems, examples, exercises…). However, it is not possible: the answer is always “no items available” “go to users data to change your profile” (or something like that). Something must missing in the oqmath/omdoc files, but I do not know what… Many thanks for an answer!
Hey AJAX guys... remove X or drop JSON!
Over and over the discussion of JSON vs XML (vs YAML…) appears: they are compared as languages to serialize object graphs. I may be old fashioned but I find there’s no valid reason for anything but XML.
Here’s a set claims in favor of JSON (or YAML it seems):
- JSON is more readable: I am sorry but I don’t find this true, being XML it’s much easier to know where parts start and end since end-tags are named. Most of the times the object graph is not sufficiently indented to recognize any structure hence readability only appears after you’ve tweaked a bit.
Translation tools requirements
Translation tools are many… but what good are they? To my surprise, there’s always some folks that find a tool that sounds cute but then it never helps. Let me try to identify the hard questions of translations’ management:
- workflow of updates (by developers) and management of translators’ contributions
- recognizing context when translating phrases
- managing translation duties for documents and phrases
The fancy conclusion? No tool I’ve met really helps any except the management of duties and generally they do so by making completely impossible the others.
A Content-dictionary is a social thing
You know what?
A content-dictionary as can be found by tons on http://www.openmath.org/cd/ is mostly a social artifact. It’s a set of descriptions of symbols so that one can mean what others means.
did anyone say notation needs context?
It’s not really new that mathematical notation is made there to be abused so as to be most efficient for the current context. But I just met an extreme case:
In the OpenMath3 and MathML3-content efforts, we are polishing the description of symbols’ so that they can be common. Discussion about using linear syntax appears, of course, and an extreme case about the need for context was just posted by James Davenport:
