Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

Hi, Ian-

Ian Hickson wrote (on 3/31/08 8:43 PM):
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Bruce Miller wrote:
>> Now, it gets interesting:
>>
>> I'd like to cut that formula and use it in a computer algebra system, or 
>> graphing calculator, or....  I need Classic MathML and the browser could 
>> reconstruct it from the DOM....
>>
>> Fine, but will that be a _requirement_ that a browser provide that?
> 
> We can't require UI, since, for instance, if a browser is running as the 
> display panel in New York's Times Square, it wouldn't make any sense for 
> the user agent to provide a little button somewhere just to allow users to 
> view the XML-serialised version of MathML snippets on the page.

Why not a conditional requirement along the lines of, "If a UA is allow 
interactivity and access to the source of a document, it must provide 
access to a full DOM serialization of the document, and may provide 
access to the raw document (pre-parsing)."  Not suggesting that actual 
wording, of course, just the general intent.


> However, it would make sense for the spec to encourage interactive UAs to 
> provide such UI. Whether they do or not of course depends on the UA 
> implementor; even if the spec _requires_ it, we can't guarantee it.

That's always the case, but that's nevertheless the goal of 
specifying... to achieve broad interoperability.  We can't guarantee 
anything, including the parsing algorithm, but it's in the best interest 
of the UA to be match the spec (hopefully).


Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 00:56:09 UTC