Re: [Patrice Treton <patrice.treton@ac-rouen.fr>] Putting maths on the web

Hi.


> - How can entities as &eacute; or &plusmn; be recognized ?  As I
> write in french, having no accent is awkward even for ordinary text.
> What needs to be added to the example file below (I only use
> presentation MathML) ?  I tried to add : PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML
> 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN'
> 'http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/dtd/xhtml-math11-f.dtd' in the DOCTYPE
> part of the file below. It solves the problem for Mozilla, but not
> for IE which doesn't like it.


There are a couple of ways to go here.  First, in IE6 service pack 2
the XML parser bug that prevented the xhtml-math11-f.dtd from working
is fixed.  However, since many people probably won't have that upgrade
yet, another route is to make up a private DOCTYPE that declares the
entity names you want to use right there in your document.  In other
words, a document like this seems to work for me on both platforms:

  ------------------------
  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="xsl/mathml.xsl"?>
  <!DOCTYPE MMLEntities [
   <!ENTITY alpha "&#x03b1;">
   <!ENTITY esdot "&#x2250;">
  ]>
  <html 
   xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   xmlns:m = "http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
  >
  <head>
  <title>test</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  <h1>Math with Entities!</h1>

  <m:math>
  <m:mi>&alpha;</m:mi>
  <m:mo>&esdot;</m:mo>
  <m:mfrac>
  <m:mi>x</m:mi>
  <m:mi>y</m:mi>
  </m:mfrac>
  </m:math>

  </body></html>
  ------------------------

> - Is there a way to select MathPlayer as MathML renderer on IE, but
> CSS on Mozilla ?  Or can one define an ordered list : MathPlayer
> first, CSS second, for instance ?

The ordered list is more or less built in, but there without
changing the XSL, there isn't an easy way to change it.  The relevant
part of the stylesheet is the definition of the "activex" parameters
and associated rules around line 200 of pmathml.xsl.  But it's pretty
finicky if you aren't fairly comfortable with XSL.

> - The attribute : display='block' isn't interpreted correctly
> with IE. Is this normal ? 

What is the incorrect behavior you are seeing?  There has been a fair
amount of discussion over what the correct behavior is.  But
unfortunately Roger Sidje's initial interpretation became frozen in
Netscape 7 before we noticed that we had taken a different approach
with MathPlayer.  In the final version of MathPlayer, we therefore
reluctantly changed MathPlayer's behavior to match Netscape 7 in the
MathPlayer 1.0 release.  So if you are seeing a different behavior, we
would like to try to get to the bottom of it.

Can you please describe the problem you are seeing in detail, and
maybe post a sample file illustrating it?  Thanks.

> - Will the files pmathml.xls and pmathmlcss.xls change in the
> future?  If so, could there be a 'official' web page, where we could
> check the version and download them if necessary ?

It is nearly certain that the stylesheets will continue to change from
time to time in response to bug reports and browser changes.  The
official page for them is:

   http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL

Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 10:59:09 UTC