- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 18:11:32 +0300
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Neil Soiffer <Neils@dessci.com>, Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>, Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>, Robert Miner <robertm@dessci.com>, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org
On Apr 1, 2008, at 09:25, Ian Hickson wrote: > > On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Neil Soiffer wrote: >> There have been theoretical arguments that it allows data to be out >> of >> sync, but practice has shown that this is a minor concern at best. > > On the contrary, experience with the Web has shown that including > redundant data (e.g. accessibility metadata, page description > metadata, > and so forth) is actively harmful, as it is almost always out of > sync with > the data seen by most users. It is also the case that most people > wouldn't > know it was available. Yes, allowing invisible alternative content for the less common use cases is anti-pattern in general, but I think parsing Content MathML into the DOM with display:none; is a relatively low-cost addition to enabling Presentation MathML. I'd rather let Content MathML then stand or fall on its merits on the market instead of deliberately poisoning its parsing. What do we lose if we ask browsers put Content MathML branches into the DOM and export them to the clipboard on copy? If Wolfram, Waterloo, Design Science, etc. do something insanely great on paste, that's excellent. If not, the browser-side investment will have been small and the great experimentation cost will have been in the computer algebra packages. Yes, discoverability for users will be a problem, but a plausible use case for copy-pasteable semantics is in course material. In that case, discovering the presence of copyable Content MathML on a per-course basis is enough and it isn't a problem of discovering things on random Web sites. > I would imagine that a much better and more > productive way to provide Content MathML to users would be to > include the > Presentational MathML inline, and then have links for users to > download > separate MathML files containing the Content MathML. Um. That's the longdesc model. That's even more of an anti-pattern than putting the alternative into the same HTTP resource. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 15:12:19 UTC