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April 12, 2008

Dinosaur

The big news this week, depending on your point of view, is either the progress in Bagger-Lambert theory, or that MathML and SVG have been added to the HTML5 Specification.

As anyone who’s been following this weblog is doubtless bored to tears to hear, serving XHTML is a complicated, finicky, business, requiring jumping through elaborate hoops to ensure well-formedness. It would be so much easier to serve this content as text/html, and rely on the liberal parsing of the HTML parser. Hence it’s very cool that future browsers will support precisely that. As far as I can tell, the only change that would be required, here, is to send the SVG unprefixed. But, since the prefixing is done programmatically (to keep the MTValidate plugin happy), this would be a very easy change. Instiki already emits unprefixed SVG.

I say “as far as I can tell,” because there are no implementations of this days-old addition to the Specification to test against. Eventually, there will be, though I wonder how MathPlayer would handle a change to text/html. There would be a grim irony if IE+MathPlayer became the only browser which needed to be sent application/xhtml+xml.

I look forward to the day when this blog becomes a dinosaur. And, now that MathML is part of the the HTML Spec, I look forward to some more browser implementations.

1 Sam, in his blog post, points out that xml:lang is not supported. This could easily be fixed.

Posted by distler at April 12, 2008 11:42 AM

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3 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: Dinosaur

As I noted in a comment at a related article by Sam Ruby, Amaya 10 rendered SVG in an HTML5 page sent as text/html. Since Amaya accomplished this, much to my surprise, the question of whether it can be done is no longer theoretical. Neither FireFox 3 beta 5 nor Opera 9.5 were able to display the SVG, but they rendered the page. The original XHTML+SVG+MathMl page can be viewed by all three browsers.

Posted by: Dana Lee Ling on April 12, 2008 8:15 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Dinosaur / HTML 5 + SVG issue

At least FireFox seems to get the “SVG as HTML” soon as far as you see here at bugzilla. In the mean time bluishcoder has a patch here.

Posted by: Jobst von Heintze on April 21, 2008 4:38 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Dinosaur

The big news this week, depending on your point of view, is either the progress in Bagger-Lambert theory

I’d be intersted in hearing your report on that progress.

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on April 13, 2008 3:56 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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