In message <43C28701.4000203@xxxxxxxxx>, Scott W Brim writes: >On 01/09/2006 10:41 AM, Sam Hartman allegedly wrote: >> Are you looking for normative figures? If so, can you point to an >> example where you think they are necessary? (I'd like to avoid a >> discussion of packet diagrams for the moment if that's OK) > >Normative figures perhaps. Normative equations definitely. > >Is there any input format for *just* equations (or figures), standing >by themselves, which we can agree is open, standardized, stable and >deterministic in output? > LaTeX is the standard in the math and theory world. It's free, and runs on just about everything. If I recall correctly what Kernighan once said, eqn was designed so that its input language was more or less what one mathematician would say to another over the phone, which (I assume) would help with accessibility. There are open source versions of eqn; I think that they run on more or less anything, too. In the pure HTML world, there's MathML, though it's *really* ugly to read. I have no idea how much it's supported by today's browsers. (Kernighan started working on an eqn to HTML translator some years ago, but back then no browser really worked properly for it.) Note that I'm *not* saying we should adopt any of these for RFCs; I'm simply saying that there are some well-known systems that satisfy at least your four criteria. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf