[Trac] [OpenMath] #102: Rethink rendering of arith1#times

[OpenMath]

#102: Rethink rendering of arith1#times
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
     Reporter:  clange      |          Owner:  kohlhase  
         Type:  task        |         Status:  new       
     Priority:  major       |      Milestone:            
    Component:  MathML CDs  |        Version:            
   Resolution:              |       Keywords:            
Include_gantt:  0           |   Dependencies:            
   Due_assign:  YYYY/MM/DD  |      Due_close:  YYYY/MM/DD
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
Comment (by david):

 One could probably solve this with CSS, but that's a theoretical idea, as
 CSS for MathML is not supported (or will it be?)


 supported by what? systems that support CSS and MathML may certainly style
 the MathML with CSS (firefox does this for example) and there is of course
 the MathML profile for CSS, for systems that essentially implement a
 subset of mathml by css, but there will never (I would guess) a
 requirement that MathML systems support CSS. Editors, computer algebra
 systems, converters to TeX etc all exist today without having a CSS engine
 and I would expect a lot of resistance to any idea that they should be
 required to implement CSS selectors in order to conform to support MathML.

 Also CSS as it stands today makes it impossible to see the content of an
 element you can not distinguish an <mo>invisibletimes</mo> from an
 <mo>(</mo> using CSS. this is why the MathML profile for CSS requires so
 much more markup from the author adding explict spacing and stretchy
 attributes to every mo, so that CSS can see them as CSS can not see the
 content of the mo and provide suitable default behaviour.
 there is a draft CSS3 module that gives selectors that can distinguish
 element content but it is largely unimplemented and may never make it into
 CSS3.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.mathweb.org/OM3/ticket/102#comment:10>
OpenMath <http://www.openmath.org>
The development of the OpenMath Standard and Content Dictionaries.