Leonard,
Dan Connolly started a thread last month on the use of XML namespaces in
AbiWord, which gives a nice overview of our intended approach:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/July/0251.html
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/July/0253.html
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/July/0269.html
To date, we've had few expressions of interest in using these features, and
zero offers of development help to get them implemented.
As for MathML as implemented in the Amaya codebase, that might be a very
interesting approach, depending on the answers to the following three
questions:
1. How good is the equations UI in Amaya?
------------------------------------------
Those of you who *are* interested in adding equations support to AbiWord
should definitely take a look at their UI for this feature, along with the
underlying code, to see how it measures up to your standards. (As a
reference point, our design goal for this project has been that each feature
Just Works, out of the box, as expected.)
2. Is that code GPL-compatible?
--------------------------------
IANAL (I am not a lawyer), but from a quick reading of W3C's IP FAQ, it
looks like their intent is for the Amaya codebase to be GPL-compatible:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ.html
3. Who's willing to do the code slam?
--------------------------------------
In theory, it should be much easier to extract the relevant equations code
from Amaya and wire it into AbiWord, rather than start from scratch. It
might make for a really tasty project. However, only someone willing to
tackle the project and bring it to completion will be able to make that
judgement.
Having never looked at the Amaya code, I have no idea how modular the MathML
portions of the code are, and I don't know how they've handled all the
necessary XP (cross-platform) GUI work.
One thing before you go too far down this path, though -- it'd take a *lot*
of convincing before I'd be willing to add support for the various Thot
languages anywhere inside AbiWord. ;-) Heck, we keep balking at adding
aspell because it uses C++ templates!
bottom line
-----------
This is an Open Source project, so we're always interested in adding
well-designed features to the product, and aren't picky about where
implementations come from, so long as:
- it's good code,
- the license is GPL-compatible, and
- someone's willing to actively maintain it.
In this case, anyone interested in doing the development work to add
equation support to AbiWord should definitely take a look at Amaya's
implementation as a source of ideas, and perhaps code.
If it makes sense to do a big code slam, we'd be more than happy to advise
you on what'd be needed on the AbiWord side to get going. :-)
Paul