Hi.
Brion Vibber wrote:
On Dec 8, 2004, at 11:34 AM, Robert Miner wrote:
I saw a thread from last August on the status of
MathML support, and
am writing to inquire if there has been any activity since.
None, so far as I know.
Thanks Brion. That's what I figured.
As co-chair of the W3C Math Interest Group, an
editor of the MathML
spec, and one of the authors of the MathPlayer plug-in for Internet
Explorer, I am interested in doing what I can to help.
There are two things to look at.
First, is the actual conversion to MathML; currently only a couple of
very simple stub bits are supported, eg nothing where it would actually
be useful. :) The TeX preparser which produces HTML and MathML output
is written in ocaml which unfortunately is perhaps an impediment to
wide hacking on it. Currently more functions are supported for HTML
output than MathML simply because the work hasn't been done.
Apart from the ocaml thing, which is a bit of a challenge, this sounds
reasonably straight forward.
Second, is producing appropriate output markup.
The current system will
embed the MathML code directly into the XHTML output. This works in
Mozilla when the wiki is configured to send an application/xml+xhtml
Content-type for pages, but not when using text/html (as is default
because not all browsers support this and we can't currently guarantee
well-formed markup at all times).
Right. This was the thrust of the August thread as well.
Does the MathPlayer work with directly embedded
code, or does it
require some sort of plug-in-style usage?
It works with directly embedded MathML.
Actually for this application, the situation is pretty good.
MathPlayer sniffs all incoming documents with the
application/xml+xhtml MIME type and looks for a DOCTYPE declaration
mentioning MathML. If it finds it, it filters the incoming document,
adding a declaration to the document header to load MathPlayer and
bind it to the MathML namespace. Also, since IE doesn't display XML
directly, it changes the MIME type back to text/html, which "tricks"
IE into displaying the document as HTML.
In practical terms, what this means is a sloppy XHTML page with
embedded MathML will generally display okay in IE. Of course it still
crashes in Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox.
I take it there is currently no convenient content negotiate mechanism
in MediaWiki so one could serve MathML embedded in (X)HTML to IE, and
HTML with PNGs to other browsers? When MathPlayer is installed in IE,
it modifies the user agent string so it is easy to detect.
--Robert
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Robert Miner RobertM(a)dessci.com
W3C Math Interest Group Co-Chair 651-223-2883
Design Science, Inc. "How Science Communicates"
www.dessci.com
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Programming for IE only should be no issue. When MathML only works with
IE it is broken beyond repair.
Thanks,
GerardM