MathML widget : XML or HTML elements?

[Lars Knoll]

Hi Ellis,

> I have a MathML widget working in khtml now.  Currently all the text

Cool :)

> between the <math> & </math> tags gets passed to the KMathMLView widget,
> which parses it using the QDom-classes.  There are a couple major
> short-comings here: 1) style settings aren't handled and 2) the nodes
> aren't externally accessable (e.g. via javascript).
>
> How should I make the MathML nodes javascript accessable?

You will have to parse the MathML directly in khtml I guess. In this case 
style settings will automatically be applied to the nodes and they will be 
accessible from jscript.

> One possibility would be to use the ElementImpl class as a parent for the
> (currently internal) KMathML node classes so that each child node is made a
> part of the khtml DOM tree, but then do I need to create both XML & HTML
> element implementations?  So far, I've created HTMLMathElement* and

No, just one kind of implementation is enough. You can make sure they get 
created from the HTML parser, and import them into the XML parser if the 
corresponding namespace is defined. 

All this would probably mean a partly rewrite of KMathMLView, moving over to 
khtml DOM classes, and maybe putting all that in a seperate subdir in khtml. 
KMathMLView would then get to be a wrapper around khtml. IMO that's the only 
way to get a 100% integration into khtml including scripting and styles.

> RenderMath classes, added ID_MATH the tokens list, and edited
> htmlparser.cpp and htmltokenizer.cpp to handle the <math> tag.  I'm betting
> that this is the wrong way to go about it.  MathML is, after all, an XML
> spec, so there must be some way to make khtml aware of the XML definition? 

You might still need to hack the html/xml parsers to create your MathML 
elements in this case and add the list of math tags to the taglist, but you 
should not need to do much more.

> Furthermore, I currently have formatting defaults hardcoded into the widget
> (such as the % font size of superscripts).  I'd rather have this defined by
> a CSS style sheet.  How do you read in a style sheet?

If you use khtml this gets automatically done for you. You get a style element 
for every node in the DOM (a RenderStyle object) containing all the 
definitions you need, as eg. font, background, width, height etc. I don't 
think that you want to redo a css parser on your own :)

Lars