Re: Corrected Chapter 5

Dear All,

Since Chapter 5 is currently zooming round the net,
may I ask a question about this material?

My question is simply: why have two separate tags
<annotation> and <annotation-xml>?

Since the contents of <annotation> must be an xml
fragment anyway (for the whole document to be well-formed)
this seems unnecessary.  It also makes writing MathML
processors more complicated, as they have to trap 
both tags as well as all the different encoding values.

Does 
<annotation encoding="MathML-Content">...</annotation>
actually have different meaning to 
<annotation-xml encoding="MathML-Content">...</annotation>
and should processors treat them differently? (Apart from
smirking and telling the user he/she got it wrong... if 
processors can smirk.)

I admit I couldn't find an example in Chapter 5,
but this one occurs in 4.2.9: 
<annotation encoding="Maple">sin(x) + 5</annotation>
what if I had accidentally use annotation-xml?
or what if Maple introduces an XML format for their 
input syntax?

Summing up, I cannot see any advantage to processors for 
having two separate tags here, but it is very much a 
trap for the unwary user who might accidentally use 
the wrong one. So why have both?

Best wishes as ever

Richard

On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 16:08 -0400, Margaret Hinchcliffe wrote:
> Attached is a corrected version of Chapter 5. I skipped over section
> 5.4, since it seems to be up in the air.
> 
>  
> 
> Margaret
> 
>  
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> Margaret Hinchcliffe
> 
> Senior GUI Developer
> 
>  
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 21 August 2007 16:51:55 UTC