RE: MathML-in-HTML5

Hi.

While I'm on my interoperability theme, I thought it might be good to
post the full list of syntactic requirements for the IE extension
mechanism for XML islands in HTML.  There are four things required to
set a page up to render an XML island with an extension like MathPlayer:

1) On the html tag, you must declare a namespace prefix:  <html
xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">

2) Before the first equation, you need to identify the extension
renderer via an OBJECT tag: <OBJECT CLASSID="..." ID="foo"</OBJECT>

3) Associate the extension with the prefix using a processing
instruction: <?IMPORT NAMESPACE="M" IMPLEMENTATION="foo" ?>

4) Use the namespace prfix on your math tags: <m:math>...</m:math>

I'm assuming that for backward compatibility, HTML5 will tolerate 2 & 3,
and what is under discussion is whether to tolerate 1&4.  Is this
correct?

--Robert

Robert Miner
Director, New Product Development

Design Science, Inc.
140 Pine Avenue, 4th Floor
Long Beach, California  90802
USA
Tel:  (651) 223-2883
Fax:  (651) 292-0014
robertm@dessci.com
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, WebEQ, Equation Editor,
TexAide ~

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-math-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-math-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 8:29 PM
> To: Roger B. Sidje
> Cc: Paul Topping; David Carlisle; www-math@w3.org; 
> dev-tech-mathml@lists.mozilla.org
> Subject: Re: MathML-in-HTML5
> 
> 
> On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Roger B. Sidje wrote:
> >
> > On 4/10/2006 10:38 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > > 
> > > The proposal that I understand Roger intends to 
> experiment with is making
> > > any tag in a particular list of tags be added to the DOM 
> as a node not in
> > > the XHTML namespace but in the MathML namespace.
> > 
> > The simpler <math xmlns="...">...</math> would make life 
> much easier, as
> > - it would avoid listing all the possible tags up-front
> > - gives parity with IE+MathPlayer out-of-the-box.
> > - future proof.
> > 
> > Perhaps xmlns could be an exceptional attribute.
> 
> There are millions of pages that have bogus xmlns="" 
> attributes on various 
> tags. If we started doing things with those attributes, those 
> pages would 
> break. That's not an option. I haven't studied IE closely 
> enough to know 
> exactly what it's doing, but it isn't as simple as simply handling an 
> xmlns="" attribute on any tag.
> 
> More importantly, xmlns="" isn't simple. Authors have huge 
> issues with 
> anything like namespaces. There really isn't a good reason to 
> introduce 
> them -- future proofing isn't an issue here (we can just 
> change the spec), 
> parity with IE+MathPlayer isn't an issue (it's easy to have a 
> script act 
> as a shim if we need such compatibility), and listing all the 
> possible 
> tags up-front is easy.
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                
> )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   
> _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 4 October 2006 17:25:51 UTC