Re: inclusion of input elements in MathML

RobertM@dessci.com wrote:

>Thanks for your suggestion.  I have long thought that at a minimum,
><maction> could easily be extended to allow input.  There might be a
>better solution, but that would be an easy way to implement
>something.  
>  
>
    deciding on a common approach -even extending maction- would be great.

     In order to have a valid document when we have to store it with 
this kind of information we were using maction with various actiontypes 
to differentiate the kind of input (box, dropdown) but these were adhoc. 
The fact that there is no accepted (or recommended) way doesn't help as 
renderers don't know what to do (apart from Mozilla where we have to 
convert the mactions back to XHTML elements anyway).

>Steve Hunt from the first MathML group coined the term "hot spot"
>editing to describe this kind of functionality, e.g. making an
>equation where just an exponent is an editable field, etc.  
>  
>
    yes, that's the kind of think we have as well or dropdown boxes with 
values (perhaps stretching it a bit with values such as +, - in the 
middle of expressions). As I said we struggle to have them rendered 
especially for IE where we convert everything to XHTML which renders our 
renderer (nice sentence!) useless.
  
 Cheers,

Manolis

>>       The recent discussions  reminded me an issue that (I think) we have 
>>discussed here before but I thought it would be good to mention now that 
>>version 3 is being considered.
>>
>>       I can't find now the relevant discussion but the issue was that 
>>it would be handy if (presentation) MathML could represent somehow input 
>>elements in order to have MathML fragments with missing parts that the 
>>user could fill (for example, inclusion of (x)form elements -at least 
>>some like input and select- would be ok).
>>   
>>    I know for sure that there are several people and project that would 
>>second this. For now we silently include input elements and we manage to 
>>get away thanks to Mozilla's tolerance that allows it and render  it 
>>fine. In other cases, when converting to paper or for IE we have to 
>>convert the MathML to XHTML first to stop plugins (e.g MathPlayer) from 
>>trying to parse this invalid MathML.
>>    
>>

Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2005 16:32:18 UTC