

annotation-xml and annotation encoding

From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:23:36 +0200
Message-Id: <62F66802-3140-4826-9438-2500DC635BC2@iki.fi>
To: www-math@w3.org

As far as I can tell, MathML 2.0 doesn't define a mechanism that's  
allow implementations to implementations to use interoperable values  
for the encoding attribute on <annotation> and <annotation-xml>. The  
spec gives four tokens leaving their meaning implicit: MathML- 
Presentation, MathML-Content, TeX and OpenMath.

In the MathML 3.0 draft, the encoding attribute on <annotation> seems  
to take a MIME type, such as text/latex or text/maple, or a product  
name token like Maple, Mathematica or TeX.

In the MathML 3.0 draft the encoding attribute on <annotation-xml> is  
said to take a namespace URI but examples use tokens such as OpenMath.

Using a namespace URI as the encoding attribute value seems redundant  
and unnecessary. Why wouldn't the consuming application inspect the  
namespace of the child element?

<annotation> and <annotation-xml> appear to be so vaguely defined that  
I have to doubt their interoperable implementability. Have they been  
implemented in applications that consumes MathML? If they have been  
implemented, have they been implemented interoperably? If they are now  
interoperably implemented, it would be good for the spec to define how  
to consume them in the way that is interoperable.

Henri Sivonen
Received on Monday, 17 December 2007 08:23:54 GMT
