- From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 12:29:25 -0500
- To: Peter Krautzberger <peter@krautzource.com>
- Cc: Arno Gourdol <arno@arno.org>, mathonweb <public-mathonwebpages@w3.org>
On Tue, 2018-01-16 at 09:30 +0100, Peter Krautzberger wrote: > Hi Liam, > > As Arno, I'm also not arguing that MathML isn't useful outside of the > browser rendering. > > But I want to comment on a few things you mentioned. > > > I don't agree that this obsoletes mathml - especially the semantic > > markup - since done well it could actually *enable* the use of > > mathml. > > I'm guessing with "enable the use of MathML" you mean that the use of > Content MathML could enable the native implementations of > Presentation MathML. Well, not exactly, sorry, now it's my turn to've been unclear. Sorry! I meant, if you have the necessary formatting in CSS in the browser, it's a relatively small step beyond that for browser vendors or third parties to add MathML, maybe starting with custom elements and custom layout via Houdini. > After 20 years, there's no significant corpus of Content MathML; On the Web that's true as far as i can tell too - off the Web it's widely used, which is a success story. That was true for a long time for CSS and for SVG too. I remember coming to the SVG spec and (1) finding it full of IDL and thinking it wasn't about a markup language, and (2) then going back and trying it and finding my browser crashed all the time, and abandoning SVG after a really painful month or so of trying to get something working in a system that didn't display error messages! I still suspect the most compelling use case for maths on the Web involves mathematics on the Web rather than equations on the Web - as has been mentioned in this thread already. Plot a graph, show me the long division, make a simple spreadsheet. That's neither LaTeX nor MathML really, although it's prolly closer to MathML. > PS: If you wrote this because you're building an application around > Content > MathML, then I apologize; it would be great to hear more about it. Haha i'm afraid not, although it'd for sure be interesting. Although Wolfram and Maple are in that sort of space already (without the mathML being central). But no need to apologize in any case :) Want MathML on the Web? Make it help with K12 homework. Make it not be all or nothing, let's have matrices, fences, roots, maths-style stacking superscripts & subscripts. Would splitting MathML up into half a dozen sub-specs ala CSS modules actually help? For sure the eqn-style notation by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry [1] (which inspired TeX/LaTeX) is massively, massively easier to type by hand than anything XML-based. But we don't have LaTeX widely used on the Web either (nor eqn)... Anyway, thanks for replying, and sorry for my laconic vagueness. Liam [1] http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/cacm.ps (1975, revised) -- 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 Tuesday, 16 January 2018 17:29:30 UTC