Re: Privacy and scope discussion

On Mar 14, 2013, at 5:21 PM, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:

> James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mar 14, 2013, at 4:22 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I am also not sure this is a 1.0 item but one really big problem is that content providers are pushing down bitmaps of Math vs. MathML. 
>> 
>> While I agree that this is a problem, MathML is outside the scope of IndieUI.
> 
> No, this item is firmly within scope. It's simply a preference that the
> application serve MathML rather than bitmap images, conceptually analogous to
> requesting text rather than images, or audio rather than text, etc.

But isn't this more about the growing pains for MathML rendering support at the moment? I believe anyone capable of providing MathML is doing so already, and the ones that are not will not think to check for a "prefers MathML to images of math" preference. 

This sounds equivalent to preferring real text to images of text. Besides a few headlines (where alt text suffices well enough), most well-developed sites are using real text to display all text, or at least body text. All the CSS rendering support for features like @font-face and properties like text-rendering:optimizeLegibility; [1] ensure that web authors have even fewer reasons to use images for text. (Remember sIFR? No one uses that anymore.) I guarantee that any site inappropriately using images to display text will not think to look for a preference for the opposite. 

My belief is that, by the time we finish IndieUI: User Context 1.0, a setting listing a preference for MathML will be similarly irrelevant.

James

1. http://aestheticallyloyal.com/public/optimize-legibility/

Received on Friday, 15 March 2013 01:09:19 UTC