Re: several messages about New Vocabularies in text/html

> Yes, people keep saying that, but I've yet to see a detailed proposal that 
> is workable. I've tried coming up with many different ideas, but all had 
> some fatal flaw that wouldn't work on the Web.

Since people have been placing content mathml (and openmath and other)
annotations on the web for the last ten years or so, it clearly is
possible to make this work on the web, it may not work in html5 as
currently specified, but I understand that one if the aims of html5 is
to codify existing practice and allow things that work now to keep
working.


HTML since forever has had rules that allow unknown elements to be
parsed (with a default rendering of ignoring the element and processing
the content) The html parser has never had to "know" anything about them
has it?

>  _Doubling_ the number of elements allowed in text/html just so that all
>  those elements can be ignored seems like a fundamentally bad idea. (It also
> more than doubles the number of elements that the parser has to know about.)


Why is it necessary to mention the content mathml elements in html5?
So long as the html5 parser knows to get from <foo> to </foo> and has
generic rules on fixing things up if the input isn't well formed.
The rule doesn't need to know anything about the specific elements
inside the annotation-xml, just when you get to the </annotation-xml>
close any open elements on the stack of open elements until you get back
in sync. (If </annotation-xml>) is missing as well it would be inserted
by the rules for fixing up the <semantics> or some other ancestor that
is closed. There will of course be details to sort out, but html needs
this anyway, surely?  Aside from mathematics, what happens if I just
stick <foo><wobble>Hello</wobble> <wobble>world</wobble></foo> in the
middle of a paragraph? Surely you have rules to get a consistent DOM out
of that without having any special knowledge of these elements don't
you?


David





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Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2008 10:22:49 UTC