- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:32:44 -0500
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: "Michael(tm) Smith" <mike@w3.org>, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, www-tag@w3.org, liam@w3.org
Dan Connolly wrote: > Noah, I'm interested in your take, as you provided the TAG > a sort of survey of the space around CDF and your experience > with Lotus notes etc. seems relevant. > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Oct/0040 Gee, how did that pop up on your radar? Interesting to read it again, but not a major source of detailed ideas for me in drafting the following (I.e. readers of this email should feel no need to plow through the document referenced above.) > Have you looked at the integration of MathML and SVG into HTML 5? If I understand the key design points in the current HTML draft, they generalize as: >>when using the text/html serialization, namespace qualification in the DOM is provided only for particular vocabularies that are baked into the (then current) version of the HTML Recommendation. Such vocabularies will, in practice, be usable without prefix qualification; in fact, even well known prefixes like <svg:circle> will not work. In HTML 5, the supported vocabularies will be MathML and SVG.<< (I'm not 100% sure regarding the bit about the prefixes not working if you use them; a quick search of the spec didn't yield a clear answer, but I may well not have looked in the right places.) > [...Dan quotes a sample document with no prefixes...] To me, the big deals are: * The fact that new vocabularies have to be explicitly supported with modifications to the HTML Recommendations. Stated differently: this is a proposal for non-decentralized extensibility. * The fact that qualified forms aren't supported (as best I can tell), even when conventional prefixes are used. The first of those points is "the big debate". I did my best to outline the pros and cons in my TPAC presentation [1]. I still am among those who believe that it's worth trying very hard to do better. Insofar as I understand Liam Quin's proposal, it seems to offer at least an interesting direction, in part because it offers a more decentralized way of supporting new vocabularies, and evolving for eventual support in the core specification. On the second point, if a way can be found to make prefixing work better in text/html, I think that would be a big plus, as this points a way toward eventual convergence of XML and text/html, should users wish to go there. Supporting prefixes, even just for well-known vocabularies like SVG, would help with some copy/paste and XSL scenarios, and would also greatly increase the size of the polyglot subset. I understand this is a hard problem and I don't at this point have a closed-form solution to promote. For a non-decentralized design, what's proposed in the HTML draft seems quite good, modulo the vague wish that there could be some way found to support explicit prefixes as well. Noah [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Nov/0004.html -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 -------------------------------------- Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org 11/10/2009 11:56 PM To: www-tag@w3.org cc: "Michael(tm) Smith" <mike@w3.org>, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM) Subject: HTML 5 integration of SVG and MathML addresses ISSUE-33/mixedUIXMLNamespace-33? John, Noah, TimBL, Henry, Have you looked at the integration of MathML and SVG into HTML 5? John, I'm interested in your take, as both an HTML WG member and a TAG member. I also note that Nokia provided an editor, Lasse Pajunen, for http://www.w3.org/TR/WICD/ ; don't feel obliged to represent a Nokia position in the TAG, but if he's not too far down the hall, I suppose you might naturally cross paths. Noah, I'm interested in your take, as you provided the TAG a sort of survey of the space around CDF and your experience with Lotus notes etc. seems relevant. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Oct/0040 Henry, I'd like this to cross your radar since you're chairing the 19 Nov TAG teleconference. On 8 Sep, Maciej said the issue is all but resolved; HTML WG has no plans to discuss this issue further as a group. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-wg-issue-tracking/2009Sep/0002.html I don't think it's a "now or never" situation, but if the 19 Nov agenda isn't full, maybe this fits. TimBL, you have talked about more general mechanisms in this space... This design seems OK to me. There isn't a general-purpose mechanism for mixing other UI-related namespaces in the spec, but any mechanism of that sort that should come along should be consistent with the HTML 5 design, IMO. (I gather XBL and/or XBL2 propose designs in this space; they seem to be in the someday pile.) That is: I don't think the HTML 5 design completely addresses our mixed UI namespace issue, but I'm OK with constraining any solution to this issue to be compatible with the HTML 5 design. The HTML 5 design puts MathML elements in the MathML namespace (and likewise SVG) with no syntactic cost to authors: [[ Here is an example of the use of MathML in an HTML document: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>The quadratic formula</title> </head> <body> <h1>The quadratic formula</h1> <p> <math> <mi>x</mi> <mo>=</mo> <mfrac> <mrow> <mo form="prefix">−</mo> <mi>b</mi> <mo>±</mo> <msqrt> <msup> <mi>b</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> <mo>−</mo> <mn>4</mn> <mo></mo> <mi>a</mi> <mo></mo> <mi>c</mi> </msqrt> </mrow> <mrow> <mn>2</mn> <mo></mo> <mi>a</mi> </mrow> </mfrac> </math> </p> </body> </html> ]] -- http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-canvas-element.html#mathml [[ 9.2.5.10 The "in body" insertion mode Status: Last call for comments When the insertion mode is "in body", tokens must be handled as follows: A start tag whose tag name is "math" Reconstruct the active formatting elements, if any. Adjust MathML attributes for the token. (This fixes the case of MathML attributes that are not all lowercase.) Adjust foreign attributes for the token. (This fixes the use of namespaced attributes, in particular XLink.) Insert a foreign element for the token, in the MathML namespace. ]] -- http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/syntax.html#parsing-main-inbody For reference: ISSUE-33 mixedUIXMLNamespace-33 Composability for user interface-oriented XML namespaces http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/33 p.s. I stuck this in tracker as ACTION-332. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 17:33:33 UTC