Re: MathML-in-HTML5

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Roger B. Sidje wrote:
> 
> Hence, either I go off and add support for the plain <math>...</math>, which
> will only work in Mozilla out-of-the-box and wouldn't be quite an overture to
> IE+MathPlayer (without yet again content negotiation or some JS trickeries by
> authors),

(Though there's no reason MathPlayer in a future version couldn't support 
this themselves.)


> or to get seamless interoperability, HTML5 may need a provision for 
> prefixed tags (at least in the case of MathML),

Note that this wouldn't get us interoperability just like that. We'd have 
to reverse engineer the entire IE extension mechanism and specify a 
compatible version. From what people have said so far, it sounds to me 
like that would be a lot of work.

Given how little the namespace-prefix syntax has taken off, and the number 
of people who are confused by namespace syntax of any kind, and the large 
amount of content on the Web that uses namespace-like syntax in a way that 
would break renderings if it was interpreted according to namespace-like 
parsing rules, however, I would strongly recommend against any sort of 
namespace-based parsing extensions to HTML. As I mentioned before, I've 
worked with an implementor in the past who tried to do this, and they 
ended up wasting months of intense work trying to be compatible with the 
large amounts of legacy content before eventually backing out the whole 
thing and ignoring namespaces in text/html content.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2006 16:26:59 UTC