RE: MathML-in-HTML5

I think I can tell you how IE deals with XML islands it doesn't
understand. If no plugin code (either installed on the machine or linked
to by the page) is associated with the namespace, or there is no
namespace specified, IE will treat the tags as unknown tags the same way
all HTML browsers deal with them AFAIK. Any text between the unknown
tags will render as if the tags were not even there, probably treating
them as white space.

Of course, if software is installed or linked that tells IE that it will
render the tags in the given namespace then that software will be
completely responsible for what it looks like on the page. MathPlayer,
for example, negotiates with IE for screen real estate via IEs DOM on an
instance by instance basis. There are also varieties of plugin software
that can render the XML nodes using standard HTML elements much as one
would use XSLT to translate custom XML into HTML but on the client side,
not the server side as is usually the case. MathPlayer is not one of
these, of course.

If the XML island is not well-formed (I hope I'm using the term
correctly), then the Microsoft HTML parser is likely to get confused.
For example, if a MathML fragment consisted of unbalanced tags, or was
missing its </math> ending tag, it may tell MathPlayer to render the
rest of the document, though they probably have heuristic rules to
prevent that in most cases. Bottom line is that there's no validation
going on. 

Paul Topping
Design Science

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev-tech-mathml-bounces@lists.mozilla.org 
> [mailto:dev-tech-mathml-bounces@lists.mozilla.org] On Behalf 
> Of Ian Hickson
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:57 PM
> To: David Carlisle
> Cc: www-math@w3.org; dev-tech-mathml@lists.mozilla.org; 
> whitelynx@operamail.com
> Subject: Re: MathML-in-HTML5
> 
> On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, David Carlisle wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> What are the rules for handling non-well-formed content? 
> (Could you show 
> me an example of this? Different people seem to mean different things 
> when they talk about IE's extension models.)
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                
> )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   
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> Things that are impossible just take longer.   
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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Received on Tuesday, 3 October 2006 23:02:15 UTC