RE: Reminder: Meeting today

Hi Liam,

Sorry for my delayed answer but I'm in the middle of closing many projects.

It is great that some people still think that with CSS should be possible to
do mathematics easier. It is probably very improbable to be able to do all
the MathML specification. But, at least, simple formulas with fractions,
roots and matrices, among others, should be achievable.

You say
> If this CG were to come up with a list of the most urgent things together
> with some tests (and patches for browsers?) I can see something happening.
That's for sure a starting point and makes sense working in this direction.
We can elaborate it more during the following group meetings.

I appreciate very much your suggestion.

Daniel Marques

-----Original Message-----
From: Liam R. E. Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org]
Sent: jueves, 6 de julio de 2017 20:45
To: Arno Gourdol; Daniel Marques
Cc: Peter Krautzberger; mathonweb
Subject: Re: Reminder: Meeting today

On Thu, 2017-07-06 at 10:20 -0700, Arno Gourdol wrote:
> Minutes from the meeting today. Any transcription errors are my own.
>
> Display of math in HTML 5

It took more than a decade for SVG to get supported natively in Web
browsers, so "never" isn't right. The support is neither perfect nor
complete (e.g. browser vendors don't seem to like SMIL animation, possibly
because it reminds them of XML) but it's usable.

If this CG were to come up with a list of the most urgent things together
with some tests (and patches for browsers?) I can see something happening.

Built-up fences, fractions, stretching characters (e.g. via font
transformation matrix), aligning separate blocks (displayed equations) on
the = sign even if there isn't one, all also have applications outside
mathematics, so having CSS able to do them would make sense to me.

[...]

> Would be much better to have an API to measure offscreen elements.

To some extent you can do this today, but you can't get at font metrics, and
in particular the math table. There are some privacy issues, but if it was
restricted to downloaded fonts maybe that would be OK.

A set of proposals for CSS might be something that the CSS WG could
conceivably consider at TPAC.

Liam

Received on Tuesday, 11 July 2017 13:59:13 UTC