Re: HTML5 @ W3C

rbs@maths.uq.edu.au wrote:
> 
> It is now official. HTML5 is going at W3C (although it isn't called 
> HTML5 -- at as least as yet).
> 
> The noises have built into a rumble, to the point of reaching the man 
> himself, Sir Tim BL, if we have to name him:
> http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166
> 
> "Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is 
> necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to 
> switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in 
> empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work."

He also says:
  "The large HTML-generating public did not move,
   largely because the browsers didn't complain."
although I suspect he misspelt "comply"

But seriously, I'd love to see MathML in HTML, provided
it was sufficiently MathML-like to fit into reasonable workflows.
Currently, I can work with XML data with embedded MathML
and generate both HTML(w/images, eg) or XHTML(w/MathML)
using stylesheets that are 90-95% shared.
If output method='html' were enough to convert real MathML
into HTML's MathML, possibly even with some XSLT compatible
namespace downgrading, that might be workable from a content
generation standpoint.

I worry that such almost-MathML wouldn't be recognizable
as MathML when cut-n-pasted to other applications, though,
which would make the MathML-in-HTML only useful for presentation
(useful tho' that is!).  

These are the concerns I had with some of the ideas
being floated within WhatWG; I hope they will carry
some weight in the continued development.


-- 
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/

Received on Sunday, 29 October 2006 09:26:13 UTC