Wikipedia article about ODF

["J David Eisenberg" <jdavid.eisenberg@gmail.com>]

The "criticism" section says that "OpenDocument is also criticized for
not using the ISO 12083:1994 standard for mathematical formulae, which
is not used within MathML either." First, this all reads like a
criticism of MathML rather than ODF. I downloaded the spec for ISO
12083 from http://www.techstreet.com/cgi-bin/detail?product_id=52643,
and found this in section 9, page 38 (12083-c.pdf) for the Mathematics
DTD

<!--
This DTD is included by the Book and Article DTDs of ISO12083:1994.
As it is a separate entity it may also be included by other DTDs.

Since there is no consensus on how to describe the semantics of formulas,
it only describes their presentational or visual structure. Since, however,
there is a strong need for such description (especially within the
print-disabled community), it is recommended that the following
declaration be added where there is a requirement for a consistent,
standardized mechanism to carry semantic meanings for the SGML
elements declared throughout this part of this International Standard: _

<!ENTITY % SDAMAP "SDAMAP   NAME    #IMPLIED"           >
and that the attribute represented by %SDAMAP; be made available for
all elements which may require a semantic association, or, in the simpler
case, be added to all elements in this DTD.                               -->

One of the goals of MathML is to  "Encode both mathematical notation
and mathematical meaning."
(http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/chapter1.html#intro.goals) This provides
a rationale for adopting MathML in favor of ISO 12083:1994.

As for MathML vs. TeX, Knuth's TeXbook says: "This is a handbook about
TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful
books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics."
(http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/tex/).  That's not
ODF's goal. OpenOffice.org uses MathML's <math:annotation> element to
store a TeX-like representation of the formula; example:

   <math:annotation math:encoding="StarMath 5.0">a over b + 2</math:annotation>

Future ODF specs could recommend putting in a TeX-encoded annotation,
given that there are MathML to TeX converters
(http://www.mathmlconference.org/2002/presentations/smirnova/index.html)