Re: Comments on XHTML + MathML + SVG Profile

Hello,

Thank you very much for your comments.  This is my response speaking
as an editor of this specification, not an official response from
the HTML/Math/SVG WGs.

Xan Gregg <xan@tibco.com> wrote:

> Since your specification is completely DTD-based, the XML Schema WG has
> little expertise to contribute.  We believe such a profile would be
> unnecessary if the three modules supported XML Schema.  As you are probably
> aware, XML Schema provides explicit support for definition of
> namespace-qualified vocabularies, and for using such vocabularies in
> combination.  We recognize that this proposal meets an important need for
> those who require or prefer DTDs, but we believe it might be appropriate to
> at least signal the potential advantages of using XML schema.  Of course, we
> would be delighted if you would in fact develop and include such a schema.

The reason is simple - at the moment:

  - XHTML 1.1 is a Recommendation, which includes DTD
  - MathML 2.0 is a Recommendation, which includes DTD
  - SVG 1.1 is a Recommendation, which includes DTD

while:

  - Modularization of XHTML in XML Schema is a Last Call WD
  - MathML 2.0 2nd edition, which includes XML Schema for MathML,
    is a Last Call WD
  - there's no official XML Schema for SVG 1.1 yet

This profile per se doesn't define normative schema for each language,
it just combines those schemas together.  There's no intention to
discriminate against XML Schema, I just need XML Schema for each
language in order to use XML Schema for XHTML+MathML+SVG, as
indicated in the Introduction section.

There's another unfortunate reason we had to use DTD despite various
known limitations.  Since XML Schema doesn't support entities,
we had to stick to DTD mechanism to support XHTML/MathML character
entities.  Two known implementations, Amaya and Mozilla, both
recognize this document type declaration to support XHTML/MathML
character entities in an XHTML+MathML+SVG document.

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2003 16:15:11 UTC