RE: MathML-in-HTML5

It's not clear to me what you would expect to happen if the browser did
"syntax checking". Just reject the document and display nothing? No one
would want an HTML browser to do that. Nor would they want to see a
stream of syntax errors and validation failures. Content developers have
tools to validate content that they use to find bugs. Most developers
simply send it to the browser and if it looks right it is good to go.
Even tag soup can be validated, it's just that the "standard" is the
defacto one defined by the most popular browsers.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 4:35 PM
> To: Paul Topping
> Cc: David Carlisle; www-math@w3.org; 
> dev-tech-mathml@lists.mozilla.org; whitelynx@operamail.com
> Subject: RE: MathML-in-HTML5
> 
> On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Paul Topping wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> If there's no syntax checking, and the error handling rules aren't 
> well defined, then it's just tag soup.
> 
> 
> > Just to confirm, David is correct, MathPlayer treatment of 
> bad input 
> > (ie, malformed MathML) by putting it in a red box is its 
> own invention. 
> > IE plays no role. MathPlayer is just given a DOM tree rooted at the 
> > <math> node and it can do as it pleases. (Actually, MathPlayer has 
> > access to the entire DOM and more if it wants it.) One 
> consequence of 
> > this is that (a) MathPlayer doesn't have to implement an 
> XML parser and 
> > (b) it can't correct any limitations or errors in its parsing.
> 
> If MathPlayer is just given a DOM, then all the parsing is 
> done by IE; if 
> all the parsing is done by IE, then, again, it's just tag 
> soup, not XML of 
> any kind. The term "XML data islands" would be very 
> misleading to anyone 
> who supported XML primarily for its strict syntax error 
> handling rules.
> 
> So it comes down to a decision between tag soup with 
> namespace prefixes 
> and tag soup without namespaces. As noted in earlier mails, 
> the latter 
> seems more likely to enjoy a long term success.
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                
> )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   
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> Things that are impossible just take longer.   
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>

Received on Tuesday, 3 October 2006 23:54:48 UTC