RE: [mediaqueries] MathML

I didn't see any responses to my previous post, but would add that another issue we seem to have is that people are viewing MathML, and the potential for using MQs in EPUBs, simply as a display/rendering issue. EPUBs, particularly in education, are an important means of interchange, as they are for accessibility, apart from any visual rendering issue. We need to give publishers a way to do that. That's the crux of the issue at this point, or at least _a_ crux.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tab Atkins Jr. [mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2016 2:02 PM
To: Paul Topping
Cc: Avneesh Singh; Florian Rivoal; www-style list; W3C Digital Publishing IG; Peter Krautzberger
Subject: Re: [mediaqueries] MathML

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Paul Topping <pault@dessci.com> wrote:
> I will admit to not being an expert on media queries but is the state of MathML implementation in browsers really a deciding factor on whether there should be a math MQ? I appreciate there's a difficulty in deciding how good an implementation must be but that is surely a problem shared by other complex media types. Isn't MathML's value in accessibility enough to justify the creation of a math MQ?

No.  The deciding factor is whether people actually want to *use* MathML for displaying equations, in the UAs that support it.  Based on discussion with publishers, it looks like the answer is "not really", because of the poor quality of implementations; they'd rather use MathML with a high-quality renderer to produce the equation once, then just use the rendered result directly, as it means they don't have to test all the UAs to ensure every equation display correctly.
(Contrast this with SVG - the implementation quality for SVG is sufficient that people are fine with using it as a display format directly, even tho rendering it to a raster image would give them more control and assurance that it was correct.)

Every feature we add has a cost, and must be justified by sufficient benefit.  If MathML simple isn't being used much as a display format, then we don't need to worry about catering to it yet.  Yes, this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue, but most things are; we can't preemptively support everything just in case one of them becomes popular.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2016 18:48:03 UTC