Re: Re: several messages about New Vocabularies in text/html

The conversation has died down and I'm pretty happy with the results.  There
is one more issue I'd like to raise related to this, but I'm afraid this may
be contentious -- here's hoping it's not and that you have already solved
this problem...

I think (but don't know) that most MathML on the web today is delivered as
XHTML.  However, some users have decided that, for whatever reason, they
don't care that the MathML won't display well natively in all browsers and
choose to send it out in HTML and tell the user to use IE+MathPlayer or they
include David Carlisle's pan-galactic style sheet (
http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/).

I think (but don't know) that most of the html pages with MathML in them use
a namespace prefix.  Certainly that is the case for those that work with IE
because that is a trigger to IE's binary behavior extension mechanism.  At
the end of this email is an  example from
http://www.onemathematicalcat.org/Math/Algebra_II_obj/summation_notation.htm
which declares the "m" prefix on the html tag and then uses it (eg,
<m:math>).  I think (but don't know) that for those who choose to put MathML
in HTML (not XHTML), this is typical.

I looked around the whatwg site some, but didn't see what the current
proposal does with the namespace prefix ":".  Are pages that encode MathML
like the one below going to break, or will they continue to work in HTML5,
either because of some general scheme or because of some specific MathML
(and SVG?) namespace handling plan?

Here is some typical(?) MathML in HTML:

<html xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">

...

<m:math><m:mstyle displaystyle="true">

<m:munderover>
<m:mo>&sum;</m:mo>
<m:mrow><m:mi>i</m:mi><m:mo>=</m:mo><m:mn>1</m:mn></m:mrow>

<m:mrow><m:mn>10</m:mn></m:mrow>
</m:munderover>

<m:mrow>
<m:msup><m:mrow><m:mi>i</m:mi></m:mrow><m:mrow><m:mn>2</m:mn></m:mrow></m:msup></m:mrow>

</m:mstyle></m:math>

...

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 22:15:35 UTC