Re: [MathML4] Deprecation/Removal of the mfenced element

On 26/07/2016 08:09, Frédéric WANG wrote:
> Certainly, one can write <mo>+<mrow> without proper grouping as that's
> unfortunately often the case for markup generated from text
> representation like TeX or ASCII. But the existence of an mfenced
> element in MathML does not magically force converters or people to do
> this grouping.

Yes I agree with Frédéric here that as long as you put all the mrow back
in, there is no loss of information in expanding out mfenced.

Speaking personally, for this and for the msqrt suggestion (and I
suspect others to follow:-) I don't really have a problem if as a
browser rendering environment we end up specifying some more minimalist
profile of MathML that provides all the rendering functionality needed
with less duplication in the markup possibilities.

People who are generating mathml and want the markup to closely follow
the underlying dom and rendering trees (perhaps to ease interactive
behaviour such as selecting subterms) would want to stick to that profile.

People wanting to generate (or render existing) MathML 2 and 3 style
markup could be provided with a very lightweight javascript that expands
out mfenced and does whatever else is needed. This means that
mfenced<->mrow/mo equivalence is moved out of the core rendering engines
into user javascript space which, if it helps get mathml into the core
rendering engines, isn't too high a price to pay, I think.

Such a javascript would be at the same level as the original asciimathml
  javascript for example, something that takes a specified user input
syntax and modifies the DOM to the mathml elements supported on the
platform. (The same can of course be done with content mathml)
which means that these aspects are not browser specific and the same
transformation code can be used across browsers, and just used at the
option of the page author if they reference the appropriate code.

David

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Received on Tuesday, 26 July 2016 08:49:05 UTC