Re: [MathOnWeb] call for comments -- directions for 2018

On Mon, 2018-01-15 at 18:34 +0000, Arno Gourdol wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 5:57 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2018-01-15 at 13:44 +0000, Arno Gourdol wrote:
> > > Personally, I don't think that MathML is the solution. I would
> > > rather
> > > see CSS and ARIA improved. This would be a less significant
> > > effort
> > > from a standard and implementation point of view, while providing
> > > a
> > > more flexible solutions.
> > > 
> > > Specifically, I would like to see support in CSS for stretchable
> > > fences and notations, features which are currently
> > > difficult/impossible to implement well.
> > 
> > I agree that building mathematical formatting on CSS (and extending
> > CSS
> > where needed) makes sense in the Web platform.
> > 
> > I don't agree that this obsoletes mathml - especially the semantic
> > markup - since done well it could actually *enable* the use of
> > mathml.
> > You might as well say that having display:block and size:larger
> > obsoletes the h1 element, but that'd be ignoring the needs of
> > search
> > engines and content management systems.
> > 
> 
> I should have been clearer since you seem to disagree with something
> I didn't say. I'm not arguing that MathML should be obsoleted. 

oops sorry!

> I agree that MathML could have a role to play as a machine-readable
> format.
> However, that doesn't mean that browsers should have anything to do
> with displaying MathML. There are a number of solutions today that
> display MathML in browsers, even if those browsers don't support
> MathML. Browsers do not need to support MathML for MathML to be
> useful.

Well, that's for sure true although it would be helpful for adoption if
they did!

Thanks for explaining what you meant. I thnk we agree that browsers
need to support the necessary building blocks, though, and that w'd
like them to do that through CSS rather than hard-wiring behaviour to
specific element names, although we may diverge on the importance of
having those element names also shared by being e.g. part of the user
agent stylesheet.
> 
-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 15 January 2018 19:01:10 UTC