- From: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:14:48 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org
- Cc: robertm@dessci.com, neils@dessci.com
> Could you enlighten me as to what you mean > about the need for a new syntax? I think everyone agrees that MathML benefits from the strictness requirements in XML. Any "loose" syntax can be considered at best an abbreviation, and possibly error correction. But it needs to be there for the integration. Strict MathML is already available. It can even be embedded in HTML as an object. To get a tighter integration, it would have to fit in better with HTML. HTML, in practice, is much less strict. Much of the html 5 spec is taken up specifying how to recover from errors in such a way that the language will continue to support not just "loose", but "sloppy". You may not agree with that, but the browser vendors consider it a requirement -- otherwise too many pages break, and no one actually upgrades. XHTML was (partly) an attempt to get rid of the sloppiness -- and it didn't work. Even most pages that claim to be xhtml aren't really valid. But browsers support them anyhow. If you want MathML integrated more tightly with HTML, then it *will* be treated the same way HTML is treated. As Robert Miner pointed out, most MathML authors are quite comfortable using tools (and treating the *ML as the output of a binary step), if that is needed for compatibility. In HTML that isn't true. It isn't just people who hand-edit (though there are a fair number) or cut-and-paste without understanding, it is that there are many invalid tools and templates. These people won't suddenly fix their whole toolchain to support math. The conscientious will just avoid MathML because of the cost of making the rest of the page valid. Most people will go ahead and use it in a simplified, invalid manner, which the various browsers will correct in different adhoc ways. That is the worst of both worlds. So if there is to be an integration, it is better to use a much simplified model, and specify a common error-correction strategy. -jJ
Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 16:15:32 UTC