Re: [MathOnWeb] call for comments -- directions for 2018

On Mon, 2018-01-15 at 13:44 +0000, Arno Gourdol wrote:
> Personally, I don't think that MathML is the solution. I would rather
> see CSS and ARIA improved. This would be a less significant effort
> from a standard and implementation point of view, while providing a
> more flexible solutions.
> 
> Specifically, I would like to see support in CSS for stretchable
> fences and notations, features which are currently
> difficult/impossible to implement well.

I agree that building mathematical formatting on CSS (and extending CSS
where needed) makes sense in the Web platform.

I don't agree that this obsoletes mathml - especially the semantic
markup - since done well it could actually *enable* the use of mathml.
You might as well say that having display:block and size:larger
obsoletes the h1 element, but that'd be ignoring the needs of search
engines and content management systems.

There are plenty of features in mathematical formatting that would be
of use elsewhere, ranging from line-breaking of complex structures
(e.g. Japanese two-line wraechu) to fences to alignment of displayed
equations on the = sign with an equation number in the margin.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 15 January 2018 17:57:33 UTC