RE: Corrected Chapter 5

The content for "annotation" is cdata, where as the content for
"annotation-xml" is XML.  Hence, you use "annotation" when the encoding
is something like Maple or TeX, and use "annotation-xml" for
MathML-Content or some other XML type (eg, ChemML, ...).  That allows
you to take advantage of an XML parser or other XML tools.

	Neil


-----Original Message-----
From: www-math-request@w3.org [mailto:www-math-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Richard Kaye
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 9:52 AM
To: www-math@w3.org
Subject: 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 17:24:44 UTC