[math-on-web] CG meeting minutes, 2017/06/08

Hi everyone,

Below are the minutes from the CG meeting last week.

Please note the call to action to comment on
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1339, especially if you are
building tools.

Best,
Peter.

# [math on web CG] minutes 2017-06-08

* On the fly agenda
  * Peter: want to talk about CSS WG thread
  * Dani: stretchy characters
    * https://w3c.github.io/mathonwebpages/examples/display/html5.html

* Introductions
  * Arno: background in software engineering
    * wrote graphic calculator for Mac, years ago, worked at Apple, Adobe
    * web platform effort at Adobe
    * mathlive.io - recent passion project, work in progress
      * render and editor
      * TeX quality rendering
      * easy UI
* Dani: added example for stretchy characters
  * Dani: should the browser be the responsible?
  * Arno: probably need a math aware font?
  * Dani: less worried about the font
  * Arno: but as author, you're going to specify a font
    * for the stretchy to work correctly, you could scale it
    * but usual, you need the various pieces in between the stretchy parts
    * just a stretched Courier brace would be horrible
  * Dani: to some degree, it works because of font fallbacks
  * Arno: would be good if the browser could fallback to a math aware font
  * Dani: browser needs to detect dimensions
* Peter: I'd be cautious
  * Chrome kicked out MML after conflict surrounding stretchy characters
  * opentype math tables might seem like the right standard but in my xp
not enough fonts (perhaps too expensive to make), more problems than
solutions from adopting them
  * default fonts on systems is a faint hope
  * math tables are font engine, not exposed to CSS
  * mathjax historically used the TeX approach of piecing together chars,
  * now switched to transforms to stretchy one char, for v3 we are pursuing
an even simpler solution
  * Arno: tried something similar but issues with alignment
  * Dani: our solution is also very tricky so looking for simpler solution
* Peter: I used to think that perhaps the solution lies in seeing stretchy
as fences => therefore CSS border more natural
  * and also menclose notations
  * Neil: borders can't do all menclose notations things
  * Exactly
* Dani: I like the border situation
  * Peter; I actually moved away from that again
    * But Dani asked what a potential a way might be to get CSS to do
something rather than nothing to help and borders might be "something"
  * Arno: might be a good way to broaden the appeal, to get interest beyond
math layout
* Dani: one problem with border is that you cannot control the style
  * e.g., can't control the font
  * Peter: I moved away from border because I'd expect to the idea would be
deligated to "wait for Houdini"
* Neil: Houdinin not moving forward?
  * Peter: it is but I don't think it's a path to native features, much
like web components isn't turning out that way.

* Peter: on https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1339
  * I plan to respond was waiting for next meeting, I will post some
MathJax feedback
  * Neil: is this just baseline or within equations
    * [the latter, more complex problem]
  * Peter: CALL TO ACTION leave comments from other implementation
  * Arno: good idea to relate to wider use case
    * CALL TO ACTION would be good to find more example
  * Dani: we should use cases of simple mathematics
  * Peter: hopefully other math tool implementers chime in
  * Arno: obviously, you CAN do it with CSS
  * Arno: CSS will need much broader use case