Mathematics on the Web: Basic Methods

Presenting Mathematical Concepts on the World Wide Web

Mathematics on the Web: Basic Methods

Basic methods of including mathematical notation in web pages take advantage of several relatively simple mechanisms within HTML:

Remember that you can use the View Source feature of your browser to examine how any of the effects you noticed on those pages were achieved.

Some Advantages of Basic Methods

Basic methods are the most reliable:
- Pages are highly transportable,
- They reach the largest possible audience,
- Expert knowledge is not required to create them;
Entities and marked-up text are searchable;
Files of reasonable size can be easy to download.

Some Disadvantages of Basic Methods

Limited layout possibilities;
Work-arounds can take time to develop;
Limited interactivity.

A useful tool for mathematicians who are already familiar with LaTeX is latex2html.

"Tomorrow" we will devote the entire day to reviewing and implementing some more advanced methods that utilize other software and file formats, including:

HyperTeX and its relatives,
Adobe PDF files,
WebEQ java-based equation rendering, and
SGML publishing tools.

Before doing that, however, let's do the following:

Do an assignment, just to be sure everyone can manage the basic methods first, and then
Once you've finished the current assignment, you can move on to the second major topic for today, where you will consider some basic design issues. We'll do that before going on to more math so that, hopefully, folks won't invest a lot of time on pages that they'll later end up re-doing because of simple design flaws.

Final Page This Topic: Assignment
Next Topic: Think Visually: Screen versus Page Design
Last Topic: The Basics of Creating a Web Page

Presenting Mathematical Concepts on the World Wide Web. Copyright © 1997 by Carol Scheftic. All rights reserved. (This course is based on a workshop originally offered at The Geometry Center and adapted with permission.) Please send comments on this page, or requests for permission to re-use material from this page, to: scheftic@geom.umn.edu

Page established 1-Jun-97; last updated Monday, 21-Jul-1997 11:19:58 CDT.