Re: XSL Stylesheet for Cross Browser MathML viewing

> Hope IE6 can resolve the bug sooner rather than later so that we
> don't have to continuously work around their bugs.

true, and they say they will, although given that there's one or two
IE6's already deployed even if the fix is released tomorrow it will
take a while before the current IE6 can be ignored by the stylesheet.
Of course you should not be too hard on MS over this bug, all software
has bugs, during the development of the stylesheet, much of the work was
involved in keeping it working in mozilla's XSLT (which in earlier
mozilla's was not a very full implementation, although the latest 0.9.9
release seems a lot more stable).

> [Note: there are PUA values in the Mozilla's mathml.dtd to handle 
> surrogate and plane-1 characters via entities given that the 
> MathML spec is ahead of the means at our disposal ATM, especially
> w.r.t. cross-platform support.]

see what I mean about having to work around mozilla "features":-) The
output from XSL never has entity references so the dtd, and the entity
definitions in there do not affect the output of (any) XSLT transformation.

> What about adding the DOCTYPE for Mozilla instead?

that's harder as that is specified on xsl:output so can't be
conditional, a transform either adds a doctype or it doesn't.

> More and more things are being made catalog driven (as per
> the catalog spec) 

It's not clear that that is wise, given the move towards schema (usually
dtd-less) processing.  I think it would be much more robust if mozilla
would for example detect the mathml namespace being declared on the
<html >document element rather than use the presence of a dtd
declaration.

Especially for results of mozilla's built in XSLT engine, note that XSLT
stylesheets have no information about the DTD specified on the input
so even an "identity transform" will remove any DTD information.

This stylesheet could add a MathML+XHTML dtd always, but what if the
input was XHTML+MathML+SVG? that would also work in an SVG enabled
mozilla, but the stylesheet would then remove any reference to SVG in
the DOCTYPE.

David
(this is getting a bit mozilla specific, maybe we should drop www-math
from the cc)

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Received on Thursday, 21 March 2002 04:08:55 UTC