New Vocabularies

This page summarises the problems discussed in the e-mails that ended up in the html-parsing-rules-namespaces-discussion folder.

• Putting an equation in a Web page.
  Priorities:
  • Maintainability
  • Searchability
  • Accessibility
  • Typographically-sound printing
  • Ease of authoring (are authors willing to learn new formats?)
  • Ease of import from existing documents
  • Ease of implementation (are UAs willing to implement new formats?)
  • Resistance to errors (e.g. not brittle in the face of syntax errors)

• Migrating from LaTeX to HTML.
  Priorities:
  • Fidelity

• Writing a document by hand, with inline diagrams imported from a graphics package.
  Priorities:
  • Compatibility with existing graphics packages
  • Scriptable (retained-mode, with DOM support, without requiring cross-frame scripting)
  • Round-tripping (the ability to take image fragments from a Web page and edit them)
  • Ease of implementation (are UAs willing to implement new formats?)
  • Resistance to errors (e.g. not brittle in the face of syntax errors)

• Writing a document by hand, with vector graphic icons.
  Priorities:
  • Maintainability
  • Good caching behaviour

• Mixing vector graphics and mathematics.
  Priorities:
  • Diagrams that include typographically-correct mathematics
  • Formulae that include vector graphics

• Animating Web page content (hypertext, vector graphics) without using script.
  Priorities:
  • Set or animate sizes, positions, opacities, colors, transforms (basically most attributes and properties)
  • Time-based triggering, event-based triggering
  • Inlined (for simple web pages) and non-inlined animations (to promote separation of content and presentation)
  • Linear and spline interpolation

• Writing highly interactive, graphically intensive sites.
  Priorities:
  • Searchability
  • Accessibility

• Writing applications that contain graphics that represent custom data, while including that data for script manipulation.
  Priorities:
  • Embedding custom non-visible data in an HTML document for scripting purposes
  • Ability to avoid ID clashes in multiple-document transclution
  • Forward compatible (so that future extensions don't introduce name clashes)

• Ability for an author to unilaterally extend the language to address problems found by the author that have not cropped up yet and that therefore are not covered by existing functionality.
  Priorities:
  • Without trampling on the toes of others
  • Without being beholden to an external entity to provide the enhancements for the author on a timescale that is useful to the author

Areas for research

• What is the most widely known way of authoring mathematics?
• What human-editable source language are equations mostly serialised in today?

Supporting data

• Animation is a desired capability for web authors of Rich Internet Applications. Of the top Ajax Javascript toolkits listed on Wikipedia, all support some level of animation, each in a different, and possibly incompatible, way:
  • Backbase
  • dojo
  • ext
  • jQuery
  • Mootools
  • prototype (weak)
  • script.aculo.us
  • YUI