Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

 

> For example, nowhere in the above list of problems do 
> namespaces appear anywhere

You would not expect to see namespaces listed in a list of problem
statements as they are (or ought to be) a technical detail rather than a
top level item if interest to an end user.

However there are many problems that might involve namespaces in a
possible solution.

For example one common need is to extract (either by cut and paste or by
more programmatic means) expressions out of web pages and drop them into
mathematically aware systems. Several systems (Mathematica, Maple,
Microsoft Word, ...) will accept MathML directly from the clipboard
Others will accept it via other means (Open Office for example)
In (almost?) all cases these systems will be expecting Namespaced
MathML.  Now that doesn't necessarily mean that in an HTML+Math context
the mathematics needs to use an explict namespace syntax, As you're aware
there are several possibilities for getting between the linear syntax
authored from the web page and any syntax that the browser offers when
fragments are extracted which could form part of an html5 spec.

I mention MathmML above because that's what I know best, but the same is
undoubtably true for SVG. No one will write a problem saying 
"I want to use SVG in a namespace"
But they may say 
"I want the vector graphics extracted from the browser to work with existing (and
future) vector graphics systems"
And solving that problem may involve the use of namespaced svg markup at
some point in the tool chain.


David

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Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 10:26:58 UTC