RE: CSS, XSL and MathML. Some questions.

Subject: RE: CSS, XSL and MathML. Some questions.
From: Dan Hable <DHable@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 15:32:46 -0500
	<snip>
	>Note 2.  The actual transformation of the trees requires some
sort of
	>non-trivial scripting / programming capability.

	This is what I mean. MathML will require more programming
features than ECMAScript will be able to provide. Does this mean we
should change the specs for this one application? IMHO, I wouldn't do
it.

	I'm not so sure if XSL does (or will) provide processor
instructions. A processor instruction, or PI, is a feature from SGML
that is ignored by the parser but can be understood by another program.

	For example, If I had this SGML document:

	<heading>This is my heading</heading>
	<math-statment><?MathML format = "Trig"> x = sine(
theta)</math-statment>

	The parser would parse all of the data but where <?MathML
format="Trig"> appears, it would dump this command into the document
itself. Another program, like a view, would then come by and pick out
the tag and do the processing.

	XML does incorporate this idea of PI's but the format is
slightly different. The same PI in XML format would be: <?MathML format
= "Trig" ?>. You may remember this from somewhere. How about <?XML
version="1.0"?>?

	That's right. XML requires an XML processor instruction. This
allows XML documents to be parsed using a SGML parser. It is quite
clever and does make everything compatable.

	Using a set of processor instructions in XSL would:
	1) Keep the same style for writting the stylesheets. Everything
would still look like HTML lags instead of Schema.

	2) Introduce a new set of more complex processing options. This
is the goal of all this bandwidth, right?

	3) Keep the additional commands in the document in such a way
that if a viewer didn't understand the commands it could just skip the
commands.

	Point 3 would be the major benfit I would see to using PI's in
the stylesheet. If everyone started complaining about XSL not being
powerful enough, the W3C, or Microsoft and Netscape, could add
additional commands without breaking the system.

	My thoughts on the issue.

	~~ Dan ~~


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