Re: Supporting MathML and SVG in text/html, and related topics

[Trimmed the cc list.]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:30:03 +0200, Paul Libbrecht <paul@activemath.org>  
wrote:
> Le 16 avr. 08 à 12:16, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
>> For backwards compatibility in scripted browser environments, the
>> HTML DOM can't behave exactly like the XHTML5 DOM. For non-scripted
>> non-browser environments, using an XML data model (XML DOM, XOM,
>> JDOM, dom4j, SAX, ElementTree, lxml, etc., etc.) works fine.
>
> I don't know how big the holy name of backwards compatibility is but
> that should be quantified instead of quantifying the amount of URLs
> in each serialization mime-type!

The HTML DOM and XML DOM have a small number of differences described in  
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-apis-in.html#apis-in  
that have been created at the time the initial set of DOM specifications  
came to be. Web pages rely on those differences and there's not much we  
can do about that.

Essentially the DOM is the same. It's just that some getters and setters  
have slight variations in code paths based on whether it's an HTML or XML  
document.


> You seem to be speaking of XHTML5 DOM... maybe I have missed
> something in the mail torrent about that. I was talking XHTML3 vs HTML5.

What is XHTML3? (XHTML5 is the XML serialization of the HTML 5 language.  
HTML5 is the HTML serialization of HTML 5.)


> The point you make above about backwards compatibility seems to say
> that HTML5's DOM is not the same as HTML4's DOM (or their
> implementations) and, I feel, this sounds ok if the backwards
> compatibility break is not too big, therefore the request to quantify.

The HTML5 DOM is compatible with existing implementations and more or less  
identical to the HTML4 DOM for what's being considered here.


> The question remains: can't all the enhancements to HTML model done
> by HTML5 be done within an XML model decoupled from parsing?

This is already done, but to get MathML or SVG into the HTML serialization  
of HTML 5 you need to change the parser. Otherwise you can't utilize the  
deployed HTML infrastructure that most of the Web is based on.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 10:46:08 UTC