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This time around, we look at another of an XML application - Mathematical Markup Language or MathML.

No, do not worry. I know we are all scared of Math or at least most of us are. I will not be proposing any theorems or solving any trigonometric problems or problems in calculus. We will leave that for the ones who are versed in it - mathematicians and scientists.

Mathematical notations present a tricky problem in terms of storing as file. What do you store about the equations? The content information or the presentation information?

Both these approaches have been explored and implemented earlier. In terms of presentaion, TeX - a typsetting system created by Donald Kunth, that allows one markup text as well as mathematical notations (may be complex), in terms of how they must be displayed. There is even a Wordpress plugin that allows notations formated in LaTeX (derivation of TeX) to be displayed in a blog post. Also, there has been development in terms of storing mathematical content - OpenMath - where the context is maintained.

MathML, an applicaiton of XML, can store mathematical notations in terms of presentation and/or content.

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I know - this is the second post today. I have been making regular posts here since I was absent for a while, but this post does not count in one of them.

This post is in line with the previous post today, where I talked about my cell phone - the BlackBerry 8700g. I finally got my laptop. I had ordered it long back, and it was in the UPS had delivered it at my apartment office. The apartment office’s working hours is 9:00am to 6:00pm - exactly the time when I will be at my work.

I finally have a decent system. The older antique - I gave it to my father when I came to US. This one has pretty neat configurations:

• Manufacturer: DELL
• Model: Inspiron 16400
• Processor: Intel® Coreâ„¢ 2 T 5600 @ 1.83GHz
• Memory (RAM): 2 GB
• NVidia GeForce
• And more features that I cannot find details about …

Next, I just need to get a wireless mouse, and I will be back on track with respect to KalaaLog. But for Splat, that is not a dependency and you can expect more posts here.
Pictures are copyright of Arun Sasidharan. (Arun Sasidharan © 2007).

SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is an application of XML. SVG is a markup language (based on XML specifications) for describing static and animated vector graphics. It is an open standard drafted by W3C - World Wide Web Consortium, that released the XML specifications.

History

The SVG 1.0 become a W3C recommendation in 2001.  In 2003, the specification was extended to SVG 1.1 to allow for modularization. Thus, the two subsets, SVG Tiny and SVG Basic became profiles of SVG 1.1. SVG Tiny 1.2 was released in 2006.  The SVG Full 1.2, that is said to contain specification for multipage documents is not released as of date.

Features 

The vector graphics have the distinctive feature of being scalable.  And hence, the word “scalable” seems to have been included in the acronym.  In actuality, vector graphics in general, and SVG in particular allows for other transformation than scaling like translation and rotation.

There are three types of elements that can exist in a SVG document/file.

• Vector graphic shapes like lines (straight and curved), circles/elipses, and bounded shapes like polygons
• Raster images
• Text

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Last post regarding XML applications, I talked about XHTML a bit. In this post, let us glance at another application of XML - the feeds. I can better state it as RSS and Atom, instead of feed, since these terms have been quite ubiquitous.

Feeds let us keep ourselves up to date with a particular site, and the technologies that let us do this are the feed formats RSS or Atom, both applications of XML. These feeds formats follow the XML specifications. We will not talk much about RSS, here as there is already a post at Splat for it. Instead, we will look into the Atom format and also the kind of friction that seems to exist between them.

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When I was researching for the last post on XML, I realized that there are numerous applications of XML that have almost achieved what XML hoped for.  These applications of XML seem to form the “universal language” or the common data format in a particular class of applications.

In this post, we will have a glance at XHTML.

Resisting the temptation of reiterating the history of World Wide Web from the early days of its inception in CERN, we will look at XHTML history and its other implications.

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XML or eXtended Markup Language, has been a buzz word for quite a long time.  And with the proliferation of AJAX, it has seemed to gain more credibelity.  More so, it has been pitching in the compatibility front.

I have been wanting to explore XML a bit, at least on the rudimentary level, because I did not have an understanding about it till now.  I did ask Vinyas to write something about it, but he has been moving around a lot and his job is taking a toll on his free time.  So, I thought I would explore it myself - now that it seems like I would need it for use in my current project.

So, with a disclaimer that this post will not be anything ground breaking, but a rudimentary understanding of XML technology, I write it.

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