[math-on-web] meeting minutes, 2016/10/27

Hi everyone,

Below are the minutes to yesterday's call.

Best,
Peter.


# Minutes Math-on-Web-CG, 2016/10/27

 * present: Tzviya Siegman, Kevin Cheung, Jean Kaplansky, Jos de Jong, John
Pedersen, Volker Sorge, Daniel Marques, Peter Krautzberger
 * scribe: Peter Krautzberger

* plain math notation
 * Jos: have not yet picked it up again
 * Tzviya: what's the goal for this?
   * Peter: aligning different text based input, cf. commonmark effort
   * Jean: why is MathML no there? It's text based, no?
     * Jos: this is more focused on "simple", "human readable", not "full
scale" markup
   * Jean: concern: most people with MathML are not math-savvy, TeX is less
human readable than markup to them
   * Peter: it's not about grand unified standard, but getting
practitioners together, helping them
   * Jean: we need to be careful about audiences
     * on this call, mostly math people
     * but users are not mostly math people
   * Peter: agree. But many tools provide this and have users (MS Office,
Libre Office etc)
 * Volker: background on the semantic tree format in speechruleengine "dumb
semantics"
 * Peter: this connects to what Jean said, because people have looked for a
lightweight data format for exchange (discussions on mathquill, mathjax,
mathjs lists)
   * it connects with XML markup without brining in the full power of
 * Dani: what is the connection to accessibility?
   * Volker: from such a format, you can generate other renderings directly
(e.g. speech, braille)
   * Peter: also: stability across conversion
 * Kevin: would help with authoring as well. A simpler syntax is often
great (e.g., matrices in LaTeX are a pain)
 * Jean: you need to define the community here
   * otherwise not inclusive.
   * [Strong agreement throughout]
 * Jean: for me, MathJax solves most of my problems b/c problems are mathml
based
   * publishing would need something that can convert to MathML
 * Jean: unclear what the "charter" is
   * several subjects but for my background, not a place yet
   * lots of people out there doing math-on-the-web
   * not a math background
 * Dani: MathML is fine as a format, but when you put that in the browser,
you need another format
   * you lose information
   * publisher might be reliable for MathML but also accessible description
     * e.g., accessible tree
   * maybe the tools for this are not so powerful. Maybe that's a place
where discussions could start
     * Jean: agree
* Peter: there is no charter, which is both blessing and curse
* John: what are the topics we focus on?
  * Peter: emails after first one about conversation starter
  * Jean: use wiki? Use WCIG discourse?
  * Peter: at 1st meeting, the group decided on github pages (like most W3C
groups)
   * recent discussion were focused on: layout, a11y, plain text notation
* Jean: you need to break it out
  * Peter: are you volunteering? ;-)
* Jean: MathML is a core issue for a lot of people
  * Peter: it was off limits when we started
* Jean: some tasks I see interested in:
  * accessibility
  * lobbying browser vendors
* Jean: if we are more organized, we can get more interest
  * John: if there were more specific topics, it would be helpful
* Dani: @Jean could you write a summary email after the meeting?
  * for discussion at the next meeting.
  * Jean: ACTION will make a task
    * subgroups need deliverables
* Peter: ACTION will update github pages with topics we're exploring
  * Jos: +1