- From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 16:29:58 +0100
- To: whitelynx@operamail.com
- Cc: dev-tech-mathml@lists.mozilla.org, www-math@w3.org
> Well, MSIE does not deal with MathML in any form This isn't really the case. It's true that if you are using IE+MathPlayer then the math rendering is being done by an application produced by Design Science rather than Microsoft, but would you say that "Opera doesn't deal with applets in any form" just because executing an applet requires a JDK from sun (or some other Java virtual machine)? In practice, what a user experiences as "the browser" might be any number of applications from multiple companies. IE, for all it's faults, has a rather sensible way of dealing with extending HTML with XML languages (MathML, SVG, ...). Mozilla, leveraging off its open source basis, requires the core engine to be extended to support these languages. IE on the other hand exposes an API that allows a particular rendering engine to register itself to render specific XML namespaces. The actual implementation of the idea in IE unfortunately has some flaws in that it requires explict COM ids being declared in an object element in the page, and requires a non standard namespace declaration syntax, However these flaws can be hidden from the user as long as some guidelines are followed. > and I am not against > embededing MathML in environments other then XML (you can embed it in > LaTeX if you want) Yes, I once implemented an XML parser in TeX, with that in mind... http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=xmltex > but I am against turning it into tagsoup which is > different issue. I agree, and this is one of the merits of the IE approach, that I hope would be seriously considered for mozilla. It isn't necessary for HTML <4+n> to specify "html-variants" of the various XML languages, _any_ _well formed_ XML fragments can be included, so long as you register the namespace with the application to bind it to a rendering component. In IE that binding happens in the html page itself, but it would be better done at the browser level. I think that if a simpler linear input form without so much element markup overhead is required, (and almost certainly it is required) then something more like http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html is what is wanted (ie, no element markup at all). Asciimath as published at the above address does the expansion to MathML on the client (so it is the tex-like syntax that would be served) but an alternative would be to do the expansions on the server, which is essentially the wiki approach, allowing you to write 1+x^2 as shorthand for <mn>1</mn><mo>+</mo>... just as * zzz is shorthand for <ul><li>zzz... in many wiki variants. David
Received on Tuesday, 3 October 2006 15:30:06 UTC