- From: Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>
- Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:33:18 -0400
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Robert Miner <robertm@dessci.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org
Ian Hickson wrote: > On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Bruce Miller wrote: >> 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. > > 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. Ah, I see I'm taking UA too narrowly, and now understand the "UI" sense that you and others were referring to. But I also sense that you recognize the importance to us that in a UA where one might reasonably be able to extract/cut-n-paste/whatever a chunk from a page, that that chunk would be available in XML form. As far as I've been able to think the problem through, such a capability goes a long way towards interoperability. Thanks for the clarifications. -- bruce.miller@nist.gov http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/
Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 13:34:31 UTC