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)
  • Ability to include

• 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
  • Resistance to errors (e.g. not brittle in the face of syntax errors)
  • 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)

• Writing documents that include diagrams that include typographically-correct mathematics.

• The ability to animate elements in a web page (hypertext, vector graphics) without using script.
  Priorities:
  • Set or animate sizes, positions, opacities, colors, transforms (basically most attributes and properties)
  • Many ways of triggering begin/end (time-based and DOM events)
  • Inlined (for simple web pages) and non-inlined animations (to promote separation of content and presentation)
  • Linear and Spline interpolation

Philip also wrote a detailed story, which touches on several of the points above, of what we want to enable. In addition to the points above, his requirements include a solution for ID clashes in multiple-document transclution, and a solution for embedding custom non-visible data in an HTML document for scripting purposes.

Supporting data and research

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