Re: Spacing and formatting across multiple math tags

> Using tables for formatting would break the semantical structure of a 
> XHTML+MathML-document.

This is true but at the current state of specifications, you either have
to accept that or accept a text-only annotation inside the table, rather
than requiring an XHTML annotation.

This is a real issue, certainly, one we have been pushing to be solved
at a wider level. The issue of how to combine different namespaces in an
effective way. Currently it's fairly easy to do at a syntactic level but
the tools don't really support it. For example in IE once you hit a
"foreign namespace" such as SVG or MathML IE will invoke a component to
render that namespaced element but there is no way back, so inside the
mathml or svg you can't get back to IE's html rendering. So apart from
the case you have, xhtml inside mathml, we'd really like to do
commutative diagrams as mathml inside svg inside xhtml. This works in
amaya or svg enabled mozilla (as their basic rendering language is
effectively the union of the three languages) but in IE once you hit the
svg you go to adobe's svg behavior and then that can not jump to the
mathml behavior on the embedded maths.  Clearly it's unreasonable to
expect the browsers to keep supporting by default arbitrary *ML
languages that may be defined, however there is not currently any
real component architecture that allows components to dela with
namespaced fragments of documents in nested contexts as in your problem.


This is clearly not just a MathML issue, and in fact the W3C "TAG"
(technical architecture group) which is the W3C's main arbiter for
issues like this, has this on its agenda


http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#mixedNamespaceMeaning-13
which has been subsumed by
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#mixedUIXMLNamespace-33
which has the title
Composability for user interface-oriented XML namespaces
and one of the background reading items is "An XHTML + MathML + SVG Profile"


So this doesn't really help you much, especially as the TAG has only
raised this as an issue with the current "web architecture" and not
(yet?) proposed any solution, but at least I wanted to point out that
this issue is being taken seriously.

David

-- 
http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk/matthew

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Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2003 08:54:59 UTC