Re: Privacy and scope discussion

James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
 
> 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. 

Possibly. They might decide based on the user-agent.
> 
> 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.

I hope you are right. My point is simply that this is in scope for discussion.

One could also argue that requiring text rather than images of text entails a
requirement for MathML, which is merely a special case of the textual
preference. This of course raises the question of which preferences can be
inferred from others and which should be explicitly specifiable in User
Contexts. I would rather defer that discussion until the requirements and use
cases have solidified however.

Received on Friday, 15 March 2013 01:34:59 UTC