> Marking up the semantic structure of all your mathematical formulas is about as likely as marking up the parse tree and parts of speech for all your regular prose sentences.
No. The semantics of math are simpler than English prose.
My above comment may not be useful or interesting. I'm not complaining; rather, I'm seeking feedback. Is there a strong substantive argument against what I said? I'm happy to be proven wrong, or to be shown that I'm missing the point. Learning and seeing a new point of view is more enjoyable that pointing out weak argumentation. I push back to see if there is any there there.
To the substance: If one wants to argue that Semantic MathML ("SMML") will not be adopted, one would need to define a metric. Then we can model and forecast. I don't think the parent poster nor I have the time or interest to do this. I'll leave this heady analysis to the mysterious proprietary commercialized no-one-gets-fired wisdom of the Gartner Magic Quadrant [1].
Now we shift to utility. To argue SMML is not useful, you have to explain the costs and benefits of specific aspects.
* Of course markup has cost, but what are they specifically? It depends on many things, but the key ones seem to be the format/markup itself and tooling to help with it. Hopefully we can steer clear of holy wars here (aka the semantic analogue of the tabs versus spaces forever-war).
* And what are the benefits? I see three intertwined benefits: driving out ambiguity, easier categorization, and improved reasoning. Reasoning over mathematics can help find mistakes, prove theorems, connect previously disparate proofs and even fields, and lots more.
I haven't seen a convincing argument against the value of such benefits, other than arguing against their likelihood. But the latter seems hollow; such benefits can and do happen with human minds reasoning over mathematics. It is clear that computers can assist, at the very least, and perhaps even lead. I'm inclined to think that AI can scale up mathematical reasoning beyond human capabilities, even if the AI is quite far from human intelligence.
One might argue impossibility of one purported benefit of reasoning. Of course, this is downstream of the for what question, above. In sibling threads, I see what seems to be a false equivalence between formalization of mathematics and English. That argument seems to imply that formalization is "too costly" or "too difficult" or possibly even impossible. It offers shallow dismissals of the benefits at best. In summary, it doesn't make a convincing cost versus benefits argument.
No. The semantics of math are simpler than English prose.