Review solicited forapplication/cellml-1.0+xmlandapplication/cellml-1.1+xml

[Andrew Miller]

Quoting Larry Masinter <LMM at acm.org>:

> > > So content negotiation in practice doesn't use accept: headers
> > > except in limited circumstances; for the most part, the sites send
> > > some kind of 'active content' or content that autoselects for itself
> > > what else to download; e.g., a HTML page which contains Javascript
> > > code to detect the client's capabilities and figure out which other
> > > URLs to load.
> >
> > The embedding of scripts in CellML is not recommended, not defined by any
> > specifications, not (as far as I know) supported by any software packages,
> and
> > if vendors do want to support scripts, they should only use it express
> > functions which cannot be represented in MathML, not for content
> negotiation.
> > Therefore, scripts are not a viable option for CellML negotiation.
>
> If you have a HTML page that includes javascript that asks
>    IF (browser supports CellML 1.1)
>             THEN (load URL for cellML 1.1 content)
>    ELSE IF (browser supports CellML 1.0)
>             THEN (load URL for cellML 1.0 content)
>    ELSE
>        (insert content for 'can't display model')
>
> you don't put the Javascript inside CellML, you put it in the
> HTML code that decides whether or not to load CellML at all.

Given that CellML is supposed to be a language for the interchange of
mathematical models, I think that requiring an HTML page load just so you can
detect what CellML version is supported seems like unnecessary overhead, and
could cause problems for non-browser based tools. Javascript-based detection
approaches are useful in some contexts, and have been implemented before, for
web-based interfaces to CellML repository pages intended for interactive users.
However, HTML is not useful for non-browser based/non-interactive systems(but
CellML, sometimes combined with HTTP, is useful in these situations).

Best regards,
Andrew Miller


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