Re: Minutes: MathML general meeting 30 July, 2020

Hi Moritz, all,

In the meetings I've attended, I don't think we ever discussed what
the exact reasoning is to work on a quick timeline, so that's a valid
question. I myself quite appreciate Neil's impetus to move us forward,
it's good to have a driver in these distributed discussions (which can
end up meandering and stagnate, if one is not careful).

As to timelines, MathML 3 was published in 2014, so not really a
breakneck speed to be revising it in 2020, and to not take too long
doing so. As to addressing the fundamental problems with MathML 3 - I
like your point that we should make abundantly clear what the
direction of the "Refresh" effort / a hypothetical MathML 4 spec is. I
think there's a shared consensus that we're trying to get the proposed
changes to MathML in a direction where we make it "as simple as
possible but no simpler", while being mindful of existing
adopters/implementers.

Given that MathML 3 is at the very last steps before having official
support in all major browser vendors, after years of hardship, I've
understood the current effort as mainly a practical incremental
upgrade. One perspective over the core changes is that they will
simplify ongoing maintenance of the browser implementations, making
them easier to keep. If we were in a position where no browser ever
adopted MathML 3, we may be talking about complete overhauls, starting
from scratch etc. But since there is now a breakthrough in working
together with the Chromium world, it's quite sensible that the next
iteration on the spec solidifies on what appears to be a slow success
story in browser vendors. Other specs such as ePub, JATS, also have
passively delegated all math syntax to MathML, though I wonder if we
could have more people from those industries giving feedback on the
refresh effort. Maybe that comes later, after we have a draft?

A repeated, in fact belabored, criticism of MathML has been that it is
overly complex (and for Content MathML - too academic), to the point
of alienating the wider web-development community. I think we're also
trying to address a part of that in the a11y fragment of the proposal,
focusing on one application and minimalistic design. I myself view the
a11y work as a "canary in the coal mine" attempt at seeing if we can
one day simplify Content MathML to a point where it isn't "scary by
default".

But I wonder if you are worrying that we are making big mistakes which
the people on the calls are not seeing, because they are not thinking
of valid uses that are not represented in the discussions? Maybe we
should reach out to more experts from the publishing industry, or
additionally cross-talk with the folks at ePub, JATS, polyfill
engines? I am a late-comer to the Refresh group, so I don't even know
if a lot of this has already happened, maybe some of it has...

Looking forward to see what others think here,
Deyan

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:59 AM Moritz Schubotz
<moritz.schubotz@fiz-karlsruhe.de> wrote:
>
> Dear Neil,
>
> thank you very much for sharing the minutes and organizing the meetings.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
> > Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 2:00 AM
> > To: public-mathml4@w3.org
> > Subject: Minutes: MathML general meeting 30 July, 2020
> >
> > NS: I will do a Google Sheet; we clearly have more on semantics; 2 more
> > weeks on charter comments, then we’ll nail it down to W3C standards.  Thank
> > you all
> >
> I am seriously concerned about this attitude. My goal is to improve MathML and support the adoption of the MathML standards, by publishers content providers. I also agree that improving accessibility and machine readability is what we should aim for. However, I think the current document focusses on implementation details without to clearly identify the current shortcomings of MathML3 and to show why the newly proposed implementation is sigificantly better.
> That said, I would propose to keep the document open until it is good.
>
> Best
> Moritz
>
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Received on Friday, 31 July 2020 21:06:44 UTC