- From: William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 20:36:27 -0400
- To: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Cc: Grégory Pakosz <gpakosz@myscript.com>, "'www-math@w3.org'" <www-math@w3.org>
David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> writes:
> On 24/06/2014 15:56, Grégory Pakosz wrote:
> > . . .
> >
> > 2) Despite being XML, <mstack> relies on children order
> > instead of named elements like <dividend>, <divisor>,
> > <quotient>. What's the rationale behind this choice?
>
> Positional children are used quite a lot in the mathml
> design: mfrac msub etc also do not have named arguments.
Two possible rationales many years ago when child position was
introduced into presentation MathML might have been (a) less for
authors to write and (b) smaller file size.
(As I recall, the introduction of child position pre-dated
David's joining the group.)
Anyway, with hindsight it seems clear to me that named
children for mfrac, msub, ..., mstack would have been better
because it would have made a bit less work for rendering engines
and processors.
It would cause much harm now to throw out child position,
but I think it would make sense for each of the presentation
elements using child position -- certainly mfrac, msub,
msup, and msubsup, probably also mmultiscripts, maybe others
I haven't thought about carefully -- to provide alternate
content models using named children that are essentially
mrows with use restricted to the respective parents.
-- Bill
Received on Thursday, 26 June 2014 00:36:55 UTC