Subject: categories: diagrams on the web

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 13:01:47 GMT

Dear Lars,

A propos of your message to categories, I really cannot understand
why anyone would want to use any (existing) language other than
LaTeX for writing mathematics.  HTML and its developments seem to
me to be much less expressive and much more bureaucratic, especially
for writing (ordinary) mathematics.  That readers using the web have
inferior browsers is, to me, an argument for developing and promoting
better browsers, not for forcing mathematical authors to use worse
mark-up languages.

With existing web technology, there are ways of putting LaTeX 
formulae, diagrams, etc on web pages by translating them into
PostScript and then GIF files (LaTeX2HTML does this).  For simple
mathematical formulae, TTH makes full use of the (limited) features
of HTML, without using GIFs, and is what I used to translate my book
into HTML (though I had to write a substantial program to simplify
by LaTeX before TTH could cope with it).

Regarding diagrams, my view is that there is no "generic" diagram
problem - particular kinds of diagram are for me two-dimensional
variations on particular kinds of formal languages.   My own TeX
package does a good job of commutative diagrams for certain (but
not all) parts of category theory.  It is conceived as a way in
which to write two-dimensional formulae, not as a way of "drawing".

Paul

http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~pt/diagrams
http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~pt/book   ("Practical Foundations of Maths")