Yes, these are all good ideas. The web service idea is especially intriguing though the need to service a request to get at the data probably makes it about as performant as parsing images with JS. As to whether education is ok with enabling JS, I think that's ok. One can do so little in pages these days if scripting is disabled.
Paul > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:microformats- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis > Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2007 12:04 PM > To: For discussion of new microformats. > Subject: RE: [uf-new] an equation/MathML/TeX microformat? > > James Howison's idea is very neat. > > I think it might probably be difficult to write cross-browser, > performant JavaScript that parses the PNG bytes for this data, and it > would introduce an undesirable dependency on users having JS enabled > that may be unrealistic in educational settings. But it would probably > be comparatively easy to write a webservice that does the same thing and > returns an XML representation that can be downloaded: > > <span class="hequation"><a rel="equation" > href="http://webservice.example.org/png2mathml.php?uri=http% > 3A//images.example.com/345.png" type="application/xhtml+xml"><img > alt="energy equals mass times velocity squared" > src="http://images.example.com/345.png"; type="image/png"></a></span> > > Now you could layer some JavaScript on top of that which collects all > the hequation IMG source URIs, rolls them up into a single request to > the webservice, and receives back a MathML document into memory. But I'm > not clear how you'd like the script to expose the resulting information > to the end user. Intercepting attempts to copy the image to the > clipboard would probably be problematic, both in terms of how to achieve > it and in terms of confusing end users. Adding items to the context menu > would be nice, but very hard to do with JavaScript. So adding little > icons after each equation might be a better bet. > > If developers of other MathML software could be persuaded to parse data > from images, that would be good. But I think it's important to have a > link to MathML serialization within the HTML layer, given the existence > of multiple browsers and assistive technologies that can cope with > MathML (at least to some degree). > > -- > Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-new mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
![http://images.example.com/345.png"](http://images.example.com/345.png"){kind=link}