Matt Leifer

"There are quite a few wiki engines out there that are backed by a distributed version control system. This means you can easily edit them online using the browser, but also checkout the repository and work with the files in a local text editor. I am working on getting one of these wikis LaTeX and MathML enabled as a possible solution for collaborative paper authoring. I can't solve the hosting problem, but I intend to make the installation as painless as possible, including on cheapo shared hosting accounts.Adapting this to a provide a simple engine should also not be too difficult, although it would not have all the features of Wordpress." - Matt Leifer

"I don't think so. If you use a DVCS backend then you could ditch the database completely and just store all the content in flat-files. The DVCS would make sure that the history would be stored efficiently and interacting with a DVCS is similar to dealing with an abstraction-layer.Anyway, I hope to come up with a proof of concept of this within a few months." - Matt Leifer

"Hmm, I've had a few email exchanges with Andrew about these issues and the basic difference is that he doesn't seem to buy into the whole web2.0, cloud computing fandango as much as I do. In my view, the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" is a big red herring. The web is a big place and there is room for putting a variety of content types on it, both long and short form. Also, I think that the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" will disappear in the near future, particularly as ebook readers get more sophisticated and widely adopted. Turning blogs into books is already quite common, which is something that I should not need to mention on this particular blog. I agree that distributed version control systems are a great solution, but they are not for the faint of heart. A good collaborative tool should offer straightforward web interfaces for the average user, whilst allowing technically inclined users to leverage the full..." - Matt Leifer

"Gellmu is really very nice, but it is a bit off-putting for people who are just looking for something to plug into their web-app. For example, I wish someone would come up with an implementation in a language that is commonly used for web programming, i.e. not Emacs Lisp, and I wish someone would write some documentation designed for end users that doesn't assume a lot of knowledge about SGML and LaTeX (or at least doesn't assume that the reader wants to wade through a lot of technical discussion about the SGML philosophy of Gellmu)." - Matt Leifer

"Hi, As a Brit who has used Cheers as a goodbye greeting in person and over the phone for many years before email, I deplore the Supernova’s suggestion. You just have a prejudice against British slang. If I have to put up with a “Hi” at the top of every email then you can certainly put up with a “Cheers” at the bottom. Cheers, Matt" - Matt Leifer

"Nice to hear from someone in the Mozilla camp about this. I know of one javascript LaTeX->MathML converter, which is called LaTeXMathML. I tried to write an "on-the-fly" LaTeX editor using it, as you described, but it was a nightmare because the script is very buggy and the code is a mess. We really need a new implementation. Somewhat bizarrely, LaTeXMathML works with pages served as text/html already on Firefox because there seems to be a difference between converting client-side and serving a page. Somehow, the browser is "tricked" into displaying the MathML, even though it shouldn't do it according to the HTML4 specification. Strictly speaking, I guess this is a bug, although it is a feature from our point of view. There is also jsMath, which does a similarly good job of client-side mathematics conversion, although it is not using MathML.The main point is that we have had decent javascript technologies for mathematics for quite some time, and yet we have not seen the kind of rich..." - Matt Leifer

"I think I understand that application, but I am not sure how it could possibly work. You want to type E=mc^2, for example, into a search box and get back a whole list of articles about relativity. OK, well that example would probably work at the moment because the notation is so standard, but even with semantic markup I don't see how this can possibly work in general due to large differences in notation and terminology for representing the same concept. After all, content MathML and OpenMath may be more semantic than presentation MathML, but they are not magic. They can't tell you that two things are connected if you haven't told them that they are." - Matt Leifer

"That is so cool. You could run the output through a MathML->TeX converter and write all the math in your papers by hand. It's almost enough to make me want to buy a tablet PC and switch back to Windows. Anyone know of similar tools for Linux or Mac?" - Matt Leifer

"To clarify, there is content MathML and presentation MathML. I believe that content MathML is designed to solve the same problems as OpenMath, but I haven't compared the specifications so I could be wrong about that. In any case, content MathML is in much worse shape than presentation MathML, since we don't have many good translation tools and it would have to be translated into presentation MathML for display in any case.In my opinion, trying to get authors to markup semantics as well as presentation is a losing battle because in most cases people are just trying to get their mathematical content onto the web as quickly and simply as possible. I think this is the reason why both OpenMath and content MathML haven't really taken off, whereas presentation MathML is in comparably good shape. In fact, I am not entirely convinced that marking up semantics within the mathematics itself is an important issue. I mean, does anyone actually have any trouble looking up mathematical concepts in..." - Matt Leifer

"As I see it, we don't actually have a problem with *standards* at the moment, but with *implementations*. MathML is perfectly fine as a standard for displaying mathematics on webpages, but implementing it is still a bit of a nightmare. It will never be an authoring language, but there are plenty of decent ways of converting LaTeX to MathML and webpages could be easily coded to incorporate the original LaTeX markup as well as the MathML. The problems implementing MathML stem from the requirement to serve content as appication/xml, which isn't supported by Internet Explorer, and with the need to install extra fonts. The former is not a problem if you are serving static web pages, e.g. if you just want to convert an existing paper into an HTML+MathML webpage. There are plenty of existing tools that do this well. However, it seems to me that the idea that you might want to embed MathML into content management systems, e.g. Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal, etc. and other web-based..." - Matt Leifer

Blog post by Jeffrey Morton discussing Carlo Rovelli's notion of "thermal time". - Matt Leifer