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Quadratic_Solutions
Editing Equations on Web 2.0 Sites
Support for equation editing is a weakness of all Web 2.0sites that I have encountered. Students and lecturers of science and mathematics need to use equations andformulae to develop their work. The blackboard or whiteboard is convenient in the classroom, but academicsalso need to share their work online. Social networks and Web 2.0 sites are the ideal forum for sharing, but they are notgeared for academic use. Programmers of FORTRAN, ALGOL and C already have a solution; they have beenexpressing equations in plain text for half a century. It is common to see x-squared written as x^2, and the square root of x as x^.5, (x to the power of one half), but many people would not be familiar with that shorthand. Some Web 2.0 sitessupport HTML markup when editing posts and comments, and provide format controls like
Bold
and
Italics
on thetoolbar. Academic discussions would be considerably improved if Web 2.0 sites would add just three buttons:Superscript, Subscript and Greek letters to the editing toolbar. Some social networks, such as LinkedIn.com andFriendster.com do not support any HTML editing. The Hi5.com social network supports HTML in discussions, but youneed to code it by hand, or with HTML editing software such as
Kompozer
, and paste it into the edit box. Most blogs letyou attach an image to your post, so a solution is to use an online equation editor, as at
CodeCogs
or
Thornahawk
, togenerate an image of your equation. For example, the expression "\frac{-b\pm{\sqrt[]{(b^2 - 4*a*c)}}}{2a}" renders theformula for solutions to the
quadratic equation
a*x^2+b*x+c=0. I uploaded the rendered image"Quadratics_Solutions.gif" to this blog post. One popular Web 2.0 service, the online collaboration tool
Zoho Writer
has
OptionsColin McAllisterJul 7, 2009 at 12:12 PM2 commentsShare
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Editing Equations on Web 2.0 Sites - Mathematicshttp://maths.groups.vox.com/library/post/6a00fad69d53b000050110166ea1ba860c.html1 of 308/07/2009 10:38
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