Houdini [Was: Minutes of Math on the Web Community Group teleconference of 27 April 2016]

> On Apr 28, 2016, at 06:56, Paul Topping <pault@dessci.com> wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Liam R. E. Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org]
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 2:44 PM
>> To: public-mathonwebpages@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Minutes of Math on the Web Community Group teleconference
>> of 27 April 2016
>> 
>> On Wed, 2016-04-27 at 13:09 -0400, Jeanne Spellman wrote:
>>> 
>>>     Ivan: [...]
>>>     ... there is a project in CSS -- Houdini -- that may be of
>>>     interest to those who were interested in the font issue.
>> 
>> I'm sorry I wasn't able to be on the call, and delighted to see the
>> minutes!
>> 
>> A minor note -- houdini isn't about fonts. It's about opening up the
>> browser to deeper scripting so that e.g. you can have an element whose
>> contents are drawing using JavaScript automatically on demand, without
>> the huge expense (and sometimes impossibility) of today's polyflls.
>> 
>> We'll probably see custom element backgrounds first (since they don't
>> affect block layout).
>> 
>> The big question is how to make such custom-drawn content accessible.
>> 
> 
> The Houdini project sounds like something really useful for math. Besides making it accessible, I hope it allows its content to negotiate space and formatting with its container (eg, baseline alignment, line-breaking). So many embedding schemes assume that the container should always control these things. This is not the case for math and any other notation that seeks to integrate with content in the container.

With regards to Houdini, I think a valuable thing to do for this CG would be to look at the APIs being proposed in Houdini, think of how we would use them to implement math layout, and report back to Houdini whether we found it useful or lacking, and if it is lacking, what use case we were trying to solve and why didn't houdini help.

Houdini has been going on for a little while, but it is still at a somewhat early stage, and this kind of use-case driven review should be very useful.

Houdini drafts are over here: https://drafts.css-houdini.org/, with github over there: https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini-drafts

 - Florian

Received on Thursday, 28 April 2016 06:30:37 UTC