Re: Whither MathML support?

> Le 7 sept. 2017 à 19:56, Daniel Bennett <daniel@citizencontact.com> a écrit :
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a couple questions that bother me about this issue. First was the issue of accessibility. It has seemed as there is no way to have a semantic version of Math and presentation together. Is there ever going to be a single solution for Math that has just one version for both as HTML text has had (especially in HTML5)? 
> The second question, and as a strong supporter of XML, is it possible to semantically represent math with XML? For example, there is no real way to have page and line numbers in XML as well as paragraphs that span them, as this breaks nestedness. The fixes for this are problematic within XML. Is math intrinsically impossible to represent in XML? Or is it just so difficult there is no solution that can be both semantic and presentation? And is there an XSLT possible that can transform them in either direction?
> 
> Sorry if the answers are obvious, but I had not heard of them.


Hi Daniel,

First thing, I'd like to say my editor BlueGriffon has MathML editing support for all flavors of html and all flavors of EPUB.... I have customers editing tons of EPUB documents with MathML formulas inside.

About your first question: I have never really understood the need for both a semantic markup and a presentational markup for Maths. Since the early days of the EuroMATH DTD for SGML/CALS, the main focus has been favouring semantics over presentation.

The second question has a clearer answer: everything that can be semantically read by a human being can be semantically represented in XML. As someone else said, the only issue is about user-defined math elements but we have now an answer with Houdini that opens up the black box of CSS offering direct hooks onto the layout engine of browsers that implement it. All in all, I am under the very clear impression that XML (plus Houdini for user-defined constructs) is perfect for representation of Maths.

Last thing, I read a question about line numberings. That question goes faaaar beyond MathML.

1. the CSS WG has been discussing for ages a pseudo-element able to select the nth-line of a given element. While we have been having ::first-line for decades now, that potential extension remains complicated and far below the browser vendors' radars.

2. beyond the line numbering of elements that span over multiple lines, it's often the case that books number "empty lines" that we create through vertical margins between elements. We have no way of doing that now (that would be complex and the increment would depend on both the line-height of the block before the break and the one after the break...) and it's never been discussed.

Hth.

</Daniel>

Received on Friday, 8 September 2017 06:46:32 UTC