MathML amidst sibling standards: Mozilla's Building Blocks for Today and Tomorrow

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MathML amidstsibling standardsMozilla's
Building Blocks for Today and Tomorrow

• Roger B. Sidje
• The University Of Queensland

International MathML Conference 2002, Chicago,
June 28-30
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Math on the Web

• Server
• Client

Gecko (Mozillas embeddable engine) supports
numerous standards and other add-ons which can be
tapped to develop other applications without
having to re-invent the wheel, especially for
rapid prototyping.
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Tasks for Math on the Web

• Server (back-end)
• Serve / Archive the content
• Pre-process (Transformation / Negotiation)
• Computations / Searching / Mining
• Client (front-end)
• Rendering / Human-computer interactivity
• Transformation / Editing
• Computations (via Scripts / Applets)

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Gecko Standards for TasksServe HTTP Pipelining

• One of the top-ten Mozilla features
• Fast transfer of multiple items with one
  connection
• Speedup pages with numerous gifs (such as pages
  that use gifs for math display)
• Require a HTTP 1.1 server (e.g., Apache)

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Gecko Standards for TasksRendering / Layout

• HTML 4.01
• XHTML 1.0/1.1, XML extras (e.g., namespace,
  simple Xlink, Xpath, FIXPtr, etc)
• MathML 2.0
• CSS 1/2/3 (Cascading Style Sheets) for stylistic
  effects on MathML too, e.g., mi
  text-decoration blink
• Fonts/Unicode for International coverage (e.g.,
  CJK)
• Graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG, MNG, etc)

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Gecko Standards for TasksDocument Object Model
1/2/3

• Because everything is kept in-memory in the
  inflated DOM, say that footprint can be large
• Therefore breaking large documents into smaller
  ones can improve performance

• Representation of the document as a tree
• Everything counts
• attributes
• comments
• hidden elements of forms,
• etc
• Serialize / Round-trip / Transform

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Gecko Standards for TasksInteractive / Dynamic
MathML

• DOM 1/2/3 (Document Object Model)
• JavaScript 1.5(ECMAScript 262)

Sample Application JavaScripted MathML
Editorhttp//www.newmexico.mackichan.com/MathML/m
athmled.htm
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Gecko-powered MatML Editor(DOMJSXUL)
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Gecko Standards for TasksTransformation

• XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for
  Transformations) - XML syntax for DOM-to-DOM
  transformations.
• SampleApplicationUniversalMathStyleSheet.

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Gecko Standards for TasksSearching / Mining

• RDFis a schema specification to specify other
  vocabularies

• RDF (Resource Description Framework)
• metadata to organize, import and export
  hierarchical data
• spec from the Semantic Web WG to support the
  exchange of knowledge on the web
• Gecko provides client-side RDF with possible
  presentation templates (e.g., internally used to
  handle bookmarks, history, download manager, help
  system, etc)
• Sample Application Dublin Core
  (RDF vocabulary to describe electronic resources
  -- authorship, subject, publication date, etc)

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Gecko Standards for TasksSearching / Mining

• SOAP 1.1 (Simple Object Access Protocol)
• Sample Application Google SOAP APIs

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Gecko Standards for TasksDistributed
Computations

• SOAP 1.1 (Simple Object Access Protocol)
• message-passing protocol to support web services
• XML syntax for remote procedure calls
• Scalability is not proven (lightweight data)
• Missing link interoperable access to
  Computer Algebra Kernels
• Proprietary webMathematica, Maplets,
• .NET

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Existing Mozilla Infrastructure

• Cross-Platform (XP)
• XPCOM (Cross-Platform Component Object Model)
• XPIDL / XPConnect (enable scriptable components)
• XBL (eXtensible Binding Language)
• XPI (Cross-Platform Install)
• XUL (eXtensible User-interface Language).
  ........
• Plugins / OJI (Open Java Interface)
• UA Mozilla/5.0 (......) Gecko/

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Application Programming Framework of
MozillaStandards Infrastructure

• Serve HTTP Pipelining
• Rendering (X)HTML, MathML, CSS 1/2/3, XML
• Interactivity DOM 1/2/3 JavaScript 1.5
• Transformation XSLT
• Searching / Mining RDF/SOAP search engine
• Computations Scripts/Applets/SOAP CA kernel
• Security Privacy SSL/P3P
• Infrastructure XPCOM, XUL, XPI, Plugins, etc

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Gecko Toolkit 1.0

• 5 years in the making (since 1997)
• during that time IE climbed to 90in web access
  statistics

• Standards include MathML siblings that can be
  mixed freely where appropriate
• Stable (Frozen) APIs to build upon
• Standalone or embedded (e.g., small-devices)
• Samples to demonstrate embedding
• i18n / l10n / BiDi
• Extensive preferences for custom environments
• Accessibility
• Continual open-source improvements
• Numerous extras (e.g., zoom, ads blocking, etc)

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Gecko Challenge

• Interoperability create/export to Mathematica
  without Mathematica
• Sharing/accessibility
• But say that it is not to me to decide - the
  point of the talk is to raise awareness on the
  possibilities

• Many companies are in the WGs
• Migrate to standards-based solutions for greater
  interoperability
• No strings attached
• No NDA
• Examples
• webMathematica to SOAP ?
• .nb to .xhtml ?
• Worksheets and maplets to Gecko-based approaches
  for web delivery/sharing ?

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Myths on would-beGecko-based product

• Since Mozilla is open-source, if my product is
  based on Mozilla I will have to disclose my
  source
• Following the open nature of discussions,
  competing products will know what my upcoming
  product is doing (or planning to do)
• Since Mozilla is free, my product would have to
  be free

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TroubleZilla

• Not everything is rosy
• some problems are not interesting
• some problems are harddocument.write(cript...)
• Crash one, crash everyone
• Architectural changes can be slow to happen
• many dependencies (on-tree off-tree)
• integration review for the big picture
• Fear of cascading effects means that not all
  patches are driven in a timely manner