Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, David Carlisle wrote:
> 
> So the preferred solution is to use presentation mathml on the web page
> and annotate it with the content mathml. To just serve the presentation
> form over the web reduces the semantic content of the document,

Semantic content isn't an end-goal of the HTML5 work.


> harms accessibility

Really? I was assured that presentational MathML was quite accessible. Is 
this not the case?


> and harms re-use of the expressions.

How so? Presentational MathML is as copy-pastable as content MathML, I 
would assume. It reduces the likelihood that the equations will be easily 
reusable from the HTML document into the analysis tools, but how do people 
deal with that in LaTeX today? And if Content MathML is the solution here, 
why do we need Presentational MathML?


> > We actively want to avoid the Web having multiple redundant 
> > representations of content
> 
> annotating a presentation format with its meaning is not redundancy.

To most authors, it is, since most authors just want to show the equations 
and be done with it.


> > (Boy there are a lot of MathML elements, even in Presentation MathML.)
> 
> not really, presentational mathematics is a bunch of special layout 
> forms, and compared to say the markup html uses for tables, the level of 
> element use per layout form is similar. (except as previously commented 
> tokens such as numbers and identifiers are marked up individually).

There's over 80 different presentational MathML elements in MathML3. 
That's a lot of elements for one small part of HTML. Whether they are 
justified or not is not really what I'm arguing. :-)


> > What I'm basically looking for is something that just lists the 
> > elements and then for each one lists what elements are allowed as 
> > children. e.g.:
> 
> There are probably some relax ng pretty printers, or there's always the 
> toc of chapte 3 of the spec. But if you want some other format let us 
> know and we can probably generate something.

Chapter 3 doesn't seem to list the actual content models.

What I'm basically looking for is something that just lists the elements 
and then for each one lists what elements are allowed as children. e.g.:

   mglyph => EMPTY
   mi     => malignmark, mglyph, #text
   msub   => mi, mo, mn, mtext, ms, mrow, mfrac, msqrt, mroot, mpadded,
             mphantom, mfenced, menclose, msub, msup, msubsup, munder,
             mover, munderover, mmultiscripts, mtable, maligngroup,
             malignmark, mspace, mline, mcolumn, maction, merror,
             mstyle, semantics
   ...

I will investigate the RelaxNG pretty printers idea.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 30 March 2008 04:18:17 UTC