Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, William F Hammond wrote:
> >
> > No, not at all. The idea would be that the parser would automatically 
> > infer the tag names and so the DOM would look exactly like it would 
> > for this markup:
> >
> >    <math> <mrow><mn>3 </mn><mo>= </mo><mi>n </mi><mo>= </mo><mn>6 </mn></row></math>
> >
> > This is the same way that the following two HTML4 snippets are exactly 
> > equivalent and generate the same underlying DOM:
> >    <p><table><tr><td></table>
> >    <p><p><table><tbody><tr><td></td><tr></tbody></table>
> > The "tbody" isn't in the original markup, but it's still in the DOM.
> 
> Yes, thanks to the doc type definition of HTML4.

Not really thinks to the DTD. HTML5 doesn't even have a DTD, but it still 
has these implication rules, and there have been multiple implemenations 
of them in the past few months.


> More to the point -- and the reason for my allusion to March 1995 -- is 
> this: How will you persuade browser authors to provide this non-trivial 
> service?  It looks like sand-bagging to me.

The complexity of these rules is as to nothing compared to implementing 
MathML itself. We could really do this. The question is how much _should_ 
we do.

Omitting <mn>, <mo>, and <mi> for ASCII seems easy and obvious.

Are there any other error cases that we could use to imply markup? For 
example, how about making the second and subsequent elements of an <mfrac> 
always be wrapped in an <mrow>?

On a related note, is there ever a time where two or more <mn> or <mi> 
elements are siblings without an intervening <mo> element?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 30 March 2008 21:42:09 UTC