Coordinating mathematical content and presentation markup in interactive mathematical documents
Samuel S. Dooley · 1998
This paper presents a method for representing mathematical content and presentation markup in interactive mathematical documents that treats each view of the information on a separate and equal footing.By providing extensible, overridable, default mappings from content to presentation in a w a y that supports ecient mappings back from the presentation to the underlying content, a user interface for an interactive textbook has been implemented where the user interacts with high-quality presentation markup that supports user operations de ned in terms of the mathematical content.In addition, the user interface can be insulated from content-speci c information, while still being enabled to transfer that information to other programs for computation.This method has been employed to embedinteractive mathematical content i n to the IBM techexplorer [11] Interactive Textbook for Linear Algebra.The issues involved in the implementation of the interactive textbook also shed some light on the problems faced by the MathML working group [6] in representing both presentation and content for mathematics for interactive w eb documents.How should presentation markup be encoded in a document?How can the correspondence between the mathematical content and its presentation markup be coordinated?How can a user interface be insulated from mathematical content not speci c to its operation?How can mathematical content be transferred to other programs for computation?Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for pro t or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page.To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior speci c permission and/or a fee.