[coyotos-dev] OSDoc issue

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

We've hit a snag with OSDoc, and I would appreciate some input.

Context: we have a bunch of docs that need to start using formal
(mathematical) notation for various things. The best solution for this
seems to be MathML, and MathML is now supported well enough that it
would be reasonable to start relying on it.

I have a pending update to OSDoc that incorporates MathML, and it works
quite nicely, but there is one snag.

Problem: MathML cannot be embedded in HTML documents. More precisely, if
the MIME type "text/html" is inferred by the browser, it's all over.
It's actually possible to beat the browser into submission by using the
Content-type meta tag, but that isn't reliable in practice, and it
doesn't work at all if the browser is displaying a file locally (because
there is no web server to hijack the mime type).

Implication: Adopting MathML implies switching from HTML to XHTML. IE,
Firefox, and Opera have decent support for this, and also for
client-side XSLT.

Problem: I cannot find any TEXT ORIENTED browsers that implement XHTML
or client-side XSLT.

Question: If the consequence of adopting MathML is giving up text
browsers, how big a problem is this?

Alternative: I can implement a processing trail that takes MathML to SVG
and embeds the SVG into the HTML. This is pretty icky, and I think it's
probably worse than just shifting to XHTML.


shap