MathML proposal for 1.3 -- early prototype questions

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Eliot's been working on a proposal for a MathML domain in DITA 1.3,
currently approved at stage 3, waiting for full specification write-up.
Approved stage 2 proposal is here:
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/47115/proposal-13111-mathml.html

We're working on an early version of this in IBM, hoping to stay in line
with everything that will be coming in DITA 1.3. We've come up with a few
issues that may impact this proposal, and I was hoping to get some
feedback / guidance.

1. The proposal was approved at stage 2 with a specialization called
<mathml_container>. That provides a single container for math content. Our
internal stakeholders need to differentiate between math markup that should
be treated as a block (for presentation / segmentation) and markup that
should be treated as inline. Do others have this need? Is there a general
feeling of which would be better - use 2 elements, use 3 (general and
specialize for block/inline), or just use some metadata on the container to
designate block vs inline?

2. Our users would also like to store their MathML externally for some
uses. In that case we'd like something similar to the <coderef> element,
but keeping the semantic of foreign MathML. Would it make sense to have a
content model inside the MathML container that allows an option - either a
reference, or literal markup? For example, something like
<mathml_container><mathml_ref href="externalMath.xml" format="mathml"/>
</mathml_container>

Thanks -

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)