Support for MathML in Netscape.

I am fulfilling a committment made to participants in this list at the 
w3c plenery meeting earlier this year.  Sorry for the delay in my response.

Your contact at Netscape to email regarding MathML support is 
barrowma@netscape.com.  You should send to him your support for 
inclusion of MathML in Netscape.

I stated at that time that I thought MathML was not presently enabled in 
the next version of Netscape, which was wrong.  Do not interpret this as 
a committment to ship it in the next version of Netscape.  Those 
responsible for the feature set have not yet, to the best of my 
information, made any decision as to whether it will be enabled or 
disabled.  Mozilla set the initial status quo for Netscape builds, which 
can change at any time under the continuous gathering information on the 
topic up until the release of Netscape.  It is appropriate to send any 
comments on the topic to the above-listed contact -- it is useful for 
him to be able to document the case for having this functionality to 
balance against any negatives that may be discovered.  I believe that 
such comments received at this point in time could contribute 
significantly to any decision.

This MathML functionality in question demonstrates the power of open 
source development since this functionality has not been significantly 
provided by Netscape employees.  This can also raise interesting support 
issues, and it would be expected that the interested open source 
developers would continue to provide bug fixes and enhancements as 
required to keep the functionality useful, since Netscape has never 
contemplated adding developers to support this functionality, and that 
would be a more difficult question.

For those who would want more advanced features that might be addable 
via a plug-in, I still expect to ask you to support the concept of 
plugins to take us beyond what can be supported in a monolithic product 
 -- whatever is built-in in Mozilla, I can easily contemplate important 
improvements that a plugin might provide.

Ray Whitmer
rayw@netscape.com

Received on Thursday, 2 May 2002 07:29:31 UTC