- From: Deborah Kaplan <dkaplan@safaribooksonline.com>
- Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 11:02:06 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
- To: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
- cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG <public-digipub-ig@w3.org>, Peter Krautzberger <peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org>, Karen Myers <karen@w3.org>, Ralph Swick <swick@csail.mit.edu>
On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Ivan Herman wrote: > But I guess that is history. Peter can tell us more what kind of (clearly unsuccessful) lobbying happened in this area and what MathJax feels is the best way forward. And we have to think about how to make bridges between the Publishing and the Browser people, e.g., by bringing together some higher level than what we represent in this group; after all we are all geeks and not suits:-). Let us not give up yet... "Not giving up" is why I exasperates so many people. :D A core issue I think we should focus on when it comes to lobbying, not just for MathML/MathJax, but for everything else, is to remember that browsers are not not necessarily the core limitation for a lot of publishing. For all that browser limitations are very big deal, they still have more features than many of the dedicated reading systems. For one thing, they can run polyfills! And ultimately, no matter how rich a digital publication 90% of the available reading systems can support, many publishers will have to produce a single publication that does not break the remaining 10%. Lobbying toward the dedicated reading systems is one solution. I know a lot of that work has already happened. Maybe the actual solution, though, is to come up with some kind of workarounds to enable single digital publication support in reading systems with a variety of technological limitations. In digital publishing, perhaps more than in other industries, this is always going to be a chokepoint. Perhaps the real thing we need to be advocating for is coming up with a standard, non hacky solution to support changes moving forward. HTML conditionals, like the zombified revivification is NOSCRIPT. IF / ELSE blocks which get read as comments in non-supporting versions, and which can contain solutions for moving forward. (Though polyfills are difficult in digital publishing for reasons other than simply reader support; platforms which provide reading systems for publications they don't control are going to be tetchy about JavaScript; that problem isn't going away anytime soon, either.) Deborah Kaplan
Received on Friday, 21 August 2015 15:03:21 UTC