[MathMLCSS-last-call] initial thoughts re. XSL-FO

[These comments have not yet been discussed with the
 XSL-FO Task Force of the XSL Working Group, and
 should be taken as a personal heads-up and not a
 formal comment requiring a Working Group response]


Lots of good stuff in the MathML draft. And some very
clear and honest writing.

For XSL-FO 2.0, people have requested
(1) include MathML directly, e.g. having
    math:math markup directly inside an fo:inline element
    I don't think any work is needed from MathML for this.

(2) Allow such embedded mathematics to inherit CSS properties
    such as width, font, text size etc from the surrounding
    XSL-FO document.  The MathML 3 draft does move in this
    direction, but the XSL-FO WG may request more.
    It might be that, e.g. a joint WG Note could satisfy
    this, without normative changes to the MathML spec itself.

(3) I think that putting fragments of XSL-FO markup inside
    equations, where mathtext is allowed now, is also
    desired -- I'm sure that we could live with a lot of
    restrictions on this, and until we hear from XSL-FO
    implementors it's premature of us to ask for it, but
    since you're at Last Call I wanted to give you the
    idea that we might ask for it.  An example is a list
    of expressions rather like "case" notation for
    mathematics, with large curly braces or other fences,
    and perhaps a bulleted list or sequence of paragraphs
    inside.

These are exactly the things we discussed informally in a joint
meeting a year ago, so it doesn't look like we're going to be
gaining requirements.  We are working on non-rectangular
paragrahs/regions/blocks, but my personal opinion (since
we have not discussed it) is that a restriction that embedded
content must always be rectangular would be just fine in
practice.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 2 November 2009 05:47:19 UTC