Re: [mediaqueries] MathML

Hi Manuel,

I think most people interested in MathML are as well (I am anyway).

They do not change my personal assessment of either those implementations;
evidence from crawlers indicates that nobody uses native implementations,
though it's obviously too early to say that much about Safari 10

The fundamental problems with MathML as a web standard remain. And as you
point out, the implementations, in critical parts, does not follow a spec
(in the W3C or WHATWG sense) but that document written by Fred Wang (who is
the last volunteer standing, even if it's good to see him find a formal
home at Igalia).

Presentation MathML does not specify layout sufficiently and it is non
semantically meaningful, thus not accessible. And even if MathML was
suddenly implemented widely, we'd still need CSS modules to match,
otherwise MathML implementations will lock perfectly reasonable layout
features into specific tag names / namespaces.

Regards,
Peter.

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Manuel Rego Casasnovas <rego@igalia.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 03/10/16 04:47, Florian Rivoal wrote:
> > - MathML has been stagnating for a long time, and implementations do not
> seem to be making much progress. There is no reason to believe that
> implementations (either visual or screen readers) will improve sufficiently
> any time soon (or ever) to make the previous two problems go away.
>
> Actually, there's been some work recently around MathML that some of you
> might not be aware of.
>
> As you probably know MathML has been supported by Mozilla for a long
> time in Firefox, you can check it using the MathML Torture Test [1].
>
> WebKit also had an implementation that is now more or less similar to
> the one in Firefox thanks to the work done by Igalia in the last year:
> https://webkit.org/blog/6803/improvements-in-mathml-rendering/
>
> On top of that, we've an experimental branch to add MathML support in
> Chromium too [2], and we're in conversations with Google to see if we
> could rely on this work to bring MathML back to Chromium.
>
> Just to add more context, there's a MathML implementation guide [3] and
> test suite [4] developed by the MathML Association, that have been used
> as reference on the implementations of these 3 engines (Gecko, WebKit
> and Chromium).
>
> Apart from that, past year we were also doing some work regarding MathML
> and accessibility in Firefox, to add speech support for MathML content
> to the Orca screen reader:
> https://blog.grain-of-salt.com/index.php/2015/09/23/new-
> in-orca-3-18-firefox-support-rewrite-and-mathml/
>
> Last, Microsoft has stated that they'll take a look to MathML support:
> https://twitter.com/SampsonMSFT/status/727199790736384001
>
> Of course, like for many other specs there is a lack of resources to
> implement and properly support MathML on different browsers and platform
> screen readers. However it seems clear that there is some stuff ongoing
> around MathML lately. As you can see, at least from Igalia, we've been
> doing some contributions to improve MathML and we could do even more if
> we've a stronger support.
>
> Cheers,
>   Rego
>
> [1]
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_
> Project/MathML_Torture_Test
> [2] https://github.com/fred-wang/chromium.src/tree/mathml
> [3] http://www.mathml-association.org/MathMLinHTML5/
> [4] http://tests.mathml-association.org/
>