Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

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.


-- 
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 13:34:34 UTC