- From: Robert Miner <RobertM@dessci.com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 10:03:28 -0600
- To: S.Pepping@elsevier.nl
- CC: RobertM@dessci.com, www-math@w3.org
Hi Simon, > I get the impression that most MathML users rely on the validation by their > authoring tool. Is that right? I think that is largely the case. Naturally some of us have had to deal with validating hand-authored MathML, etc. But mostly it's been handled in an ad hoc way I suspect. > So we seem to be adding a new aspect to MathML validation: > validating documents containing MathML from various sources, > independently of the creation tools. > > While I was working on this, I started to wonder why the DTD is formulated > in such a loose manner. At first sight several of the requirements listed in > section 3.1.3.2 could have been enforced in the DTD (that would only be for > presentation MathML; I am not sure whether the same would be true for > content MathML). Or are there hidden problems, which I will discover when I > try to work out this idea? For MathML 1, we started down the road of making a tighter DTD, but soon came to the conclusion that a) it would make it much more complicated, and b) still be a long way from truly validating all the MathML rules since that would require parsing attribute values, etc. Also, I think you will find some hidden problems in the content MathML area, where the validation rules require a stronger notion of context than is possible with a DTD. So we decided to just acknowledge the limitations and go with a fairly minimal DTD. I'm sure that you can beef it up quite a bit if you want. However, another factor in the decision to go with a minimal DTD was the sense that schemas were coming down the road, and they were supposed to be more powerful for validation. Now in fact, schemas have been slow to arrive, and there are still serious issues with them. But we have now produced a schema for MathML 2 that does much more validation than the DTD. You can get it at http://www.w3.org/Math/XMLSchema/ It's should still be considered a work in progress, but you may find it useful. --Robert ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Robert Miner RobertM@dessci.com MathML 2.0 Specification Co-editor 651-223-2883 Design Science, Inc. "How Science Communicates" www.dessci.com ------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 11:04:07 UTC