Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

>>> practice has shown that this is a minor concern at best

>> experience with the Web has shown that including
>> redundant data (e.g. accessibility metadata, page
>> description metadata, and so forth) is actively
>> harmful, as it is almost always out of sync with
>> the data seen by most users.

> there is a world where redundant data can be a
> problem in one corner of the universe (your corner)
> and there are other corners (including Math) where
> it is not?

Sure -- but the many of the reasons it works better in MathML would
disappear when it got integrated with HTML.

In the current mathml world, the markup is almost all generated, there
are often effective validation checks (such as importing into another
algebra system), the authors are self-selected as precise and
mathematically inclined, and the toolset is already living with the
strictness of XML.

With html, even strictness of XML doesn't happen.  There isn't any
barrier to serving valid xhtml, but it doesn't happen in practice.  It
would be harder, and there isn't any cultural pressure to do so.

If mathml becomes integrated with html, the sloppier habits will often
prevail in practice, no matter what we specify.

That said, I think this may be a reverse of the normal situation.
People forget the "alt", because the image is primary.  In this case,
I think the semantics may be "primary", even though the presentational
ML is what gets shown.  If the default for semantics is to treat it as
an invisible comment, I doubt that people will go to the effort of
adding (or even copying) wrong data, and I doubt it will do much harm
to make the annotation available.

-jJ

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 18:23:37 UTC