Re: Agenda Request: values of requiredExtensions to use XHTML/MathML

Hi, Chris-

Chris Lilley wrote (on 9/14/08 9:19 AM):
> On Saturday, September 13, 2008, 1:16:48 PM, Doug wrote:
> 
> DS> [[
> DS> Basically, not mentioning the values of requiredExtensions causes a
> DS> compatibility issue. For instance, Amaya and Firefox do not agree.
> 
> DS> I propose the two values for XHTML and MathML to be
> DS> "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" and
> DS> "http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML".
> DS> ]]
> 
> DS> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2008Sep/0035.html
> DS> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2008Aug/0031.html
> 
> Slap em in a non-normative example and depend on the prevalence of copy and paste.

That actually sounds like a good idea to me.  We could even do that
in SVG 1.2 Tiny, for <foreignObject> examples.

Possible objections that could be raised:

* it doesn't actually specify behavior, so it still leaves the behavior
up to UAs
* it might not catch on... our previous example [1] used
"http://example.com/SVGExtensions/EmbeddedXHTML" and it didn't seem to
gel, but maybe for obvious reasons...  using something sensible like the
namespace URI or MIME type would be more compelling.

On the other hand, it doesn't raise questions of whether this is in
scope for SVG.

If we do decide to do something about this, I think we should not
mandate specific strings, but rather say that the required extension is
simply the namespace URI (or MIME type?) of the target language.  Here's
proposed wording:

<p>
  Language extensions may be vendor-specific or experimental features
for the
  SVG language itself, or may be separate languages (e.g, XHTML,
MathML).  If
  an extension is a separate language that supports the Namespaces in
XML 1.0
  specification [<a
href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/'>XML-NS10</a>]
  or the Namespaces in XML 1.1 specification
  [<a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names11/'>XML-NS</a>], the
  <a href="intro.html#TermIRIReference"><span class="svg-term">IRI
reference</span></a>
  should be the Namespace URI for that language (e.g.,
  "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML").
  If the language does not support either Namespaces in XML
  specification, the
  <a href="intro.html#TermIRIReference"><span class="svg-term">IRI
reference</span></a>
  should be an otherwise unique identifier for that language.
</p>

If Fred raises the issue in Last Call, we could use this or similar text.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/extend.html#AnExample

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, WebApps, SVG, and CDF

Received on Monday, 15 September 2008 06:46:16 UTC