Re: SOAP's prohibiting use of XML internal subset

Tim Bray wrote

  Which *nobody* will need to subset and *anybody* can build on (with the 
  sole exception of the MathML people, who are stuck with XML 1.* forever 
  because they want names for all their special characters).


Actually I (at least) could live with such a setup.

I think that the current  "Core WG View" document on entities
is technically wrong in its arguments that there is really no problem
using entities, and vaguely offensive in its suggestion that there is no
need for current incompatibilities (apparently suggesting the designers
of html/mathml/docbook etc are incompetent to have ended up with
incompatible entity definitions).

However a statement that entities have serious usability problems, but
that rather than fix them we'll drop them could perhaps be the basis of
a way out of the current mess. It may not be totally popular with
end users (It's not just mathml users: "how do I write & n b s p ;"
is just about the most FAQ on xsl-list.) but at least it's a consistent
and workable point of view.


Dan Connolly  wrote

  something similar, <mchar name="frac14"/> was in earlier
  drafts, e.g.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-MathML2-20000328/chapter3.html#presm:mchar

  I gather it didn't survive...


mchar had strong negative comment from two sources
W3C I18n group who didn't like the idea of yet another method of
encoding characters. (This may be less of a problem if it was a
cross-XML element rather than a specific mchar element in the mathml
namespace)

and

implementers (especially mozilla) pointed out the large extra size of
the DOM that results in having element nodes rather than character data


We were lead to believe that XML Core and/or XML schema groups would be
coming up with some general plan for this problem, so we decided not to
do a specific element in the mathml namespace at that
time. Unfortunately XML Core WG has apparently decided to drop the
issue, which is rather frustrating...

  I wonder if they document
  why not... well, the changes section only lists changes
  between mathml 1 and mathml 2.

see the last call response:
http://www.w3.org/Math/lastcall/response.html#comment6

David
(MathML2 co editor)



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Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2002 06:02:26 UTC