A few days ago I wrongly claimed that Nvu and Mozilla Composer would wipe out a document’s native doctype. My tests aren’t showing that now, which means I was likely thinking more about the spaghetti-sauce-of-the-day than about actual coding at the time.
I wanted to make this apology public for that foul-up.
I found, in the Preferences for Nvu 0.2, an installer for extensions. This discovery makes me a very happy man; I don’t have to worry about command-line installation of Abacus anymore. (In theory.) I’d guess this is the extension manager ballyhooed about.
I’m thinking one extension that would make a “killer ext” for Mozilla would be a little PNG editor. People who develop templates for MathML editing probably would like to create icons for the menu items they’ll create. Of course, Mozilla wasn’t really intended to edit graphics, but one can dream…
I noticed, absently, that Nvu 0.2 doesn’t like XHTML. (Yes, I know, after what I said about doctypes, I hear a “here we go again” groan…) It likes HTML just fine. With a little tinkering, it will like HTML + MathML as well. But when I have a link tag:
<link href=’chrome://gre/res/mathml.css’ type=’text/css’ rel=’stylesheet’/>
Nvu will record that as:
<link href=’chrome://gre/res/mathml.css’ type=’text/css’ rel=’stylesheet’>
I can’t get mad at Nvu for doing that; it’s a perfectly natural cleanup for HTML, and Nvu has no way of knowing that I want XHTML. Same problem in Mozilla Composer; it’s not really a bug.
This makes me wonder: what am I supposed to do about it? Per the XHTML Media Types note of the W3C, XHTML 1.0-compatible content types should not be used for text/html documents. In Section 3.1, the document specifically points out XHTML + MathML as “NOT suitable” (their capitalization).
I thought I saw a doctype for HTML + MathML a long time ago… can’t find it in MathML 2.0 1st Ed. (I’m about to grab MathML 2.0 2e.)
In terms of Abacus progress: the assert() function is proving very helpful indeed in forcing me to do things right. I’m just about at the point where I can save templates, but I hit a snag first: every template I create needs a file to save the template to. I placed an assert to throw an exception when I reached that point in my code, and forgot about it.
When I ran the code after fixing a couple other bugs, I noted with some concern that nothing seemed to happen after I okayed a template… and then my JS Console provided a very stern reminder. As I can’t really do any more work on Abacus without fixing that bug, I think I’d better write some code to identify a file for a new template, or create one if necessary..

.
After that, it’s building a UI for template writers to make UI’s for their templates… that, fortunately, will be the last thing required for actually editing MathML templates, and I can finally get on to editing MathML with the templates. That should be easy in comparison.