On 5/6/2013 7:20 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
Hopefully Web Components will provide a good solution to let authors extend
the browser with support for vocabularies that can be rendered via a
straightforward decomposition to HTML or MathML or SVG.
I think the layout requirements of MathML are too onerous for MathML to be
reduced to HTML or SVG that way.
I'd like understand more about this. I have been hoping that one of the
best use cases for web components is to implement these kinds of
domain-specific languages. I greatly fear that we're accidentally
pushing the web from declarative markup to a model where everything is
controlled with script: in the process, we are going to lose some of the
core benefits of the web: pervasive hyperlinking, save-as and
view-source, and . I tend to think that web components are a great way
to abstract away the presentation of new declarative languages.
Without knowing a lot about it, it seems that SVG and HTML contain all
of the primitives necessary for a web components script to implement the
visual MathML presentation. Perhaps I'm not completely aware of the
problems, though. Does MathML need to participate in inline reflow in a
way that requires direct support from the layout engine?
While diagrams such as chemical formulae, flowcharts or electronics
schematics can be compiled to SVG, the layout step is very much nontrivial
and I don't think Web Components is enough for that. Web Components plus
some JS to do the layout is probably satisfactory.
Unless I misunderstand web components, they are primarily blobs of
script, and I'm really hoping they will be able to implement arbitrary
new markup languages. I think there's a lot more that we can add to
components, especially for nonvisual presentations (better
implementation of accessibility and audio presentations seem like
near-term goals).
That still leaves us with future decisions about whether we should build
any of these markup languages into the browser. It seems clear from epub
that there is a demand for declarative math markup, and whether we build
that using web components or directly into our layout engine, it should
be a core markup language of the web.
--BDS
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