Re: several messages about New Vocabularies in text/html

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Sam Ruby wrote:
> >
> > I haven't taken a sample of text/html pages that contain such triggers 
> > yet, but I _have_ done such a sample for MathML, and it showed that 
> > for that vocabulary we would need some sort of hardcoded list to 
> > handle the existing content. (Either a whitelist of MathML elements or 
> > a blacklist of HTML elements, but either way we've lost the genericity 
> > of the problem you are trying to solve.)
> 
> I disagree that for MathML that you have shown that we would need some 
> sort of hardcoded list.  The most that you have demonstrated is that a 
> hardcoded list would suffice for a snapshot of the MathML vocabulary 
> taken at this point in time.

As I said, either a whitelist of MathML elements, or a blacklist of HTML 
ones (based on Henri and Simon's ideas). The blacklist looks like the more 
workable solution at the moment, at least in terms of the forward- 
compatibility story (though it certainly would be much easier to come up 
with an exhaustive whitelist).


> I am confident that such a hard coded list would not work for SVG, not 
> even for a snapshot of the vocabulary.  I am hopeful that whatever 
> approach you chose to accept for SVG will also apply to MathML, and will 
> not further constrain the development of that vocabulary.

Finding a way to support a graphics vocabulary and a math vocabulary has 
been on the list of problems I'm trying to solve since the beginning of 
the list; my understanding was that you wanted a solution that wasn't 
limited to just two vocabularies. I agree that the former is possible in 
some way, it's the latter that I can't see how to solve.


I now have some rough notes of what I think we can do to the parser to 
handle SVG and MathML here:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/New_Vocabularies_Solution

(This is the level of detail I've been asking for these past few years, by 
the way.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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