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bottlepalm 8 hours ago

It's too bad MathML never supported ASCII math. The web might be a different place if it did.

Rendello 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Asciidoctor renders AsciiMath to MathML [1], I imagine that it's a fairly common target after MathML (Core) was revived from the dead. While MathML is pretty verbose to write by hand, I think things like AsciiMath and LaTeX are on a different level of abstraction. You can't embed AsciiMath directly in HTML in the same way that you can't embed Markdown directly in HTML.

1. https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoctor/latest/stem/asciima...

Mikhail_Edoshin 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

XML as a standard has a concept of "notations": you can specify that contents of an element are written in such-and-such notation, which can be "asciimath" too. Of course at the XML level these are merely labels; you still need to agree on notation names and make the processors of that document to understand that notation. But as a foundation it is there.

So technically a web could indeed be a different place: a network of XML documents where all the original notations are kept as they are and merely marked with tags that formally specify: this is AsciiMath, this is C, this is SQL, and so on.