Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:17:59 -0700, Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov> 
> wrote:

[Replying out-of-order]
> You'll always have a transition period. In that period you'll likely get 
> tools on the Web that convert from one to the other and MathML products 
> might start releasing beta products with experimental HTML syntax 
> support. And browser plugins or maybe even browsers will support the 
> "copy as XML" contextmenu option.

I hope this doesn't come across as rude,
but this just seems too glib;
Yes there will be a transition period as browsers
and authors switch to HTML5. But the transition
to the point when they'll actually be able to use
MathML & SVG within it seems artificial and unnecessary.
With the right requirements, it could "just work"...
But perhaps I don't understand what is or is not in scope.

>> So, Classic MathML, provided it didn't use namespace prefixes,
>> I assume, would be valid to embed in HTML5?
> 
> I would expect the subset to have more restrictions than just not using 
> namespace prefixes. Perhaps even limited to presentational MathML as has 
> been suggested.

With a good solution to the import/export problem,
I suspect a lot of resistance from us Draconian XML'ers
would evaporate.  We could then focus on some of the
details like subsetting, syntactic icing and error handling.

Without it, I personally can't avoid the
fear that I'm spinning my wheels and spending
a lot of effort to help specify something may
end up hurting math on the web more than it helps.

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

Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 18:24:44 UTC