Re: MathML and AxKit

> What I have seen of MathML so far appears to rely on browsers to perform
> any transformations.  I was wondering if any of you are doing this on
> the server side,

there are two advantages to the client side transformations:
1) It doesn't require server configuration so "anyone" can drop the
pages on to their web server with no more effort than to use html pages
(or at least that was the idea:-)
2) the client gets "real" XML based mathml which in principle it could
do something with, even if it translates it to something else for
display. (This last reason was one of the original motivations for
developing XML as "SGML on the web" in the first place so the
original document could be sent rather than the pre-xml practice of
down-translating the sgml source to html and just sending the html view
over the network).

However there are costs involved as well, in particular it means it
doesn't work at all on non XML/XSLT browsers and there is some extra
overhead on the client side to do transformations that might not be
strictly needed (eg if sending presentation mathml to mozilla, the
stylesheet does what ammounts to an identity transform.

So there are often times when you want to do server side transforms as
well as or instead of the client side ones.

Depending on your setup you could use the same stylesheets as the
client side stylesheets (from http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL)
suitably modified to
add the object element for mathplayer (or techexplorer) and send as
text/html for IE
just send the document as text or application/xml if it is presenattion
mathml for mozilla/netscape
do a content-presentation transform wth ctop.xsl if there is content
mathml and it's going to mozilla/netscape
use some version of pmathmlcss.xsl to generate html+javascript for older
browsers
etc..

David

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Received on Wednesday, 12 February 2003 04:43:45 UTC