Re: xhtml implications

Dave  J Woolley wrote:
[...]
> > - styling possibilities with css and the like
> 	[DJW:]  
> 	As pointed out above, you can do that with HTML on an ideal
> 	browser.  I'll leave it to the Amaya team to say what is 
> 	hard coded in Amaya.

Not much. Default style for HTML pages is defined within Amaya.
This default style may be changed easily. It's defined in a single,
separate file (amaya/HTMLP.P), but it's not CSS. Formatting and
style for MathML is defined the same way (in file amaya/MathMLP.P).

You can use CSS style sheets, or the HTML <style> element, or the
HTML style attribute to change the default style with CSS.

> > - dtd for creating my own document vocabularies, if
> > needed
> 	[DJW:]  
> 	XHTML becomes a namespace.  I don't know how well Amaya supports
> 	general namespaces.  Again one for the development team.

Amaya provides general support for namespaces, I mean there is a
general mechanism for mixing various namespaces in the same document.
XHTML is really handled by Amaya as a namespace, as well as MathML or
SVG.  In the latest release, you can author SVG documents (documents
whose root element is <svg>) and in those documents you can include
pieces of XHTML or MathML.
Conversely, you can inlcude piece of MathML or SVG within XHTML pages,
or pieces of SVG containing MathML, and so on.
There is a limitation in the current version, though. Amaya can handle
only a few predefined namespaces: XHTML, MathML, SVG, XLink. And not
all those namespaces are fully implemented (only presentation part of
MathML, only a few SVG elements and attributes, only simple links from
XLink).
The Amaya team has plans for supporting any namespace, the style being
defined by a CSS style sheet. A future version will also allow several,
not predefined namespaces to be mixed in a single document. But don't
expect the editor to have a very smart behavior with those unknown
namespaces.

> > - agent-based processing of documents
> 	[DJW:]  
> 	Amaya has no scripting support.  I don't remember any
> 	mention of XSL.  Development team to confirm.  Obviously, what
> 	it produces can be manipulated by agents that do.

Right. There is no plan currently to embed an ECMAscript or XSL engine.

[...]

> > Can someone please confirm that the above-listed xml
> > benefits will indeed apply to Amaya generated xhtml
> > documents?
> > 
> [DJW:]  By definition, pure XHTML documents cannot
> include other namespaces.  I suspect, however that
> Amaya can mix namespaces (it can certainly mix in MathML),
> and therefore create multi-namespace documents, not just
> XHTML namespace ones. 

Right - see above.

> Amaya cannot create badly formed documents.  I don't remember
> the DTD support needed to prevent invalid ones.
> 
> Amaya is a test bed for CSS!

And the implementation of CSS is not complete yet, but a reasonable
set of features exists.

> I'm not aware of any transformation tools in Amaya, but any
> third party tools ought to work on what it produces.
> 
> I sense that you have been sold the benefits of XML without
> actually really being told what XML is.
> -- 
> --------------------------- DISCLAIMER ---------------------------------
> Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender,
> except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.
> 

-------------------------------------------------------
Vincent Quint                       INRIA Rhone-Alpes
W3C/INRIA                           ZIRST
e-mail: Vincent.Quint@w3.org        655 avenue de l'Europe
Tel.: +33 4 76 61 53 62             38330 Montbonnot St Martin
Fax:  +33 4 76 61 52 07             France

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2001 13:57:10 UTC