Re: declare element in ctop.xsl

> in ctop.xsl declare elements are simply removed.

yes, admitedly this is a bit minimal but I claim it is just about
conforming behaviour. Ideally one ought to take note of it and (for
example) render vectors in bold (or whatever) but doing so might have a
noticeable effect on the speed of client side transformations that are
happening in real time. Most of the "ctop" transformation is fairly
local but handling declare requires you to have some information with
global scope for the mathml expression. It may be that some clever use
of xslt keys might optimise this and I should look at that
again. However when I originally wrote that, last year some time, I had
several examples on which mozilla's xslt was taking several minutes to
do the transform, so slowing it down more wasn't an option. Mozilla (and
Netscape 7) have much faster XSLT these days.

Note however that the declare element itself should not be rendered.
it just affects the interpretation of subsequent uses of the identifier,
so

<declare>
  <ci> A </ci>
  <list>
    <ci> a </ci>
    <ci> b </ci>
    <ci> c </ci>
  </list>
</declare>

should produce no output, but later uses of  <ci> A </ci> within the
same scope ought to be rendered as an identifier denoting a list (if
that is different from the normal rendering of an identifier, eg
different font) and in a system that is interpreting the mathematics (as
opposed to just rendering it) references to A should be interpreted as
refering to the list (a,b,c).

David


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Received on Monday, 7 October 2002 08:03:34 UTC