What awaits science on the Web?

    When I wrote my diploma thesis in algebra, my supervisor traveled around the world, giving my lectures at various universities. He was not perceptible. I dubbed my labors under his guidance, and one way or another, I had to send my thoughts to him. Ordinary spoken language was little suitable for the exchange of exclusively scientific information, and my manager was interested in what would ultimately result in our publication in a journal.

    In general, I had to write my thoughts to him in Knutovsky TeX -e (read in Russian as “those”) and send him .tex files which were then compiled into .dvi (files for viewing device independent), .ps ( PostScript files ) or .pdf ( Portable Document Format files) All this suffering is associated with the fact that scientific journals accept only the .tex format - this is the standard, and they do not accept Microsoft Equations .

    The first MathML appeared in 1999, but for mathematicians, so far, nothing has fundamentally changed. All my former colleagues still prefer TeX, especially since: there are many WYCIWYG programs for different platforms; scientific articles, notes, correspondence look elegant, beautiful ; as before, the world is important , namely, printed scientific literature .

    Such literature must be black and white , and be easy to read.(so that the eye does not irritate the symbol, which is even shifted by a millimeter). In solid scientific literature, sometimes you have to think for half a day on a paragraph of a text to form your opinion, understand, realize it, and that is why the layout of science must be impeccable.

    Example : 1) look at any of Nikola Tesla's patents of the end of the year before last - this is a creation, a layout that you want to insert into a frame and hang on the wall, 2) an example is a mat. Wikipedia articles where the text and formulas are not integral, and 3) some PDF received by their TeX is an elegantly laid-out document.

    By no means do I hail Wikipedia, just today exact sciences on the Internet look very mediocre. As far as I know, there are no simple tools for creating and editing general scientific works, conducting scientific blogs. The most “enjoyable” format for reading has been PDF for many years. Vector formats on the Internet have not received widespread use, although for books, this is almost a “must-have”.

    Here I am not limited only to mathematics or physics . There is chemistry with scary benzene rings; biology with DNA schemes; chess , the last books, probably remained in the 80s, and the static from the web is supplanted by flash; circuitry ; sheet musicor arrangement of fingers on the neck of the guitar ; even origami , for the most part these are scans of manuscripts. (Perhaps I am not aware of something) Well, of course, every craftsman draws symbols well-known to many in his own way, so the scientific web does not look ascetic and neat, but rather replete with colors and fonts.

    I used to be a fan of XML, just because of the flexibility of this format, because of the existence of XPath , XSL-FO , RenderX technology . In MathML, I'm starting to get a little disappointed because the war of formats in the scientific community is won not by W3C , but by Adobe .

    Also popular now: