Working Draft 10-Jul-97

Glossary

Attribute
A parameter to an XML element (specified in the start tag) that is composed of an attribute name and a value.

Axis
The axis is an imaginary alignment line upon which a fraction line is centered. Often, characters that can stretch such as parenthesis, brackets, braces, summation signs, etc., are centered on the axis and are symmetric with respect to it.

Baseline
The baseline is an imaginary alignment line upon which a glyph rests. Often, characters that appear next to each other are positioned so that their baselines are on the same level.

Black box
The bounding box of the actual size taken up by the viewable portion (ink) of a glyph or expression.

Block level tag
A term used for categorizing display style (math in between paragraphs) MathML elements.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
A mechanism that allows authors and readers to attach style (e.g. fonts, colors and spacing) to HTML documents.

Character
A member of a set of identifiers used for the organization, control or representation of text.

Character Data (CDATA)
A SGML data type for raw data which does not include markup or entity references.

Character or expression depth
Distance between the baseline and bottom edge of the character glyph or expression. Also known as the descent.

Character or expression height
Distance between the baseline and top edge of the character glyph or expression. Also know as the ascent.

Character level tag
A term used for categorizing inline (math as part of a paragraph) MathML elements.

Character or expression width
Horizontal distance taken by the character glyph as indicated in the font metrics, or the total width of an expression.

Content elements
MathML elements which explicitly specify the meaning of a portion of a MathML expression.

Document Object Model Working Group (DOM )
A W3C working group developing a model in which the document or Web page is treated as a an object repository.

Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL)
A method of specify the formatting and transformation of SGML documents.

Document Type Definition (DTD)
In SGML or XML a formal definition of the elements and the relationship among the data elements (the structure) for a particular type of document.

Embedded object
Objects such as Java applets, Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) objects (e.g. ActiveX Controls and ActiveX Document embeddings), and plug-ins which reside in an HTML document.

Entity reference
A sequence of ASCII characters of the form &name; which represents some other data, typically a non-ASCII character, a sequence of characters, or an external source of SGML data, eg. a file containing a set of standard entity definitions such as ISOLat1.

Extensible Markup Language (XML)
A simple dialect of SGML intended to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web.

Fences
In typesetting, bracketing tokens like parentheses, braces, and brackets which usually appear in matched pairs.

Font
A particular collection of glyphs of a typeface of a given size, weight and style, eg "Times Roman Bold 12 point"(see the comp.fonts FAQ).

Glyph
The actual shape (bit pattern, outline) of a character image.

Input syntax layer
A planned MathML extension mechanism designed to facilitate hand entry of MathML content.

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)
The markup language (specified in this document) for describing mathematical expression structure, together with a mathematical context.

MathML element
An XML element which describes part of the logical structure of a MathML document

Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
A set of specifications that offers a way to interchange text in languages with different character sets, and multi-media content among many different computer systems that use Internet mail standards.

OpenMath
A general representation language for communicating mathematical objects between application programs.

Parsed Character Data (PCDATA)
A SGML data type for raw data occurring in a context in which entity references may occur.

Presentation elements
MathML tags and entities intended to express the syntactic structure of math notation.

Presentation layout schema
A presentation element that can have other MathML elements as content.

Presentation tokens elements
A presentation element that can have only parsed character data as content.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)
An ISO standard (ISO 8879:1986) which provides a formal mechanism for the definition of document structure via DTDs Document Type Definitions), and a notation for the markup of document instances conforming to a DTD.

TeX
A software system written by Donald Knuth for typesetting documents.

Typeface
A typeface is a specific design of a set of letters, numbers and symbols, such as "Times Roman" or "Chicago".