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

Hi Liam,

General comment: It would help avoid confusion if people could make an
effort of separating Presentation from Content MathML.

>  > After 20 years, there's no significant corpus of Content MathML;
> On the Web that's true as far as i can tell too - off the Web it's
> widely used, which is a success story.

Do you have a reference?

I'm not aware of any significant corpus of Content MathML on or off the web
(unless you count theoretical content like content hidden in CAS).

Regards,
Peter.


2018-01-16 18:29 GMT+01:00 Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>:

> On Tue, 2018-01-16 at 09:30 +0100, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
> > Hi Liam,
> >
> > As Arno, I'm also not arguing that MathML isn't useful outside of the
> > browser rendering.
> >
> > But I want to comment on a few things you mentioned.
> >
> > > I don't agree that this obsoletes mathml - especially the semantic
> > > markup - since done well it could actually *enable* the use of
> > > mathml.
> >
> > I'm guessing with "enable the use of MathML" you mean that the use of
> > Content MathML could enable the native implementations of
> > Presentation MathML.
>
> Well, not exactly, sorry, now it's my turn to've been unclear. Sorry!
>
> I meant, if you have the necessary formatting in CSS in the browser,
> it's a relatively small step beyond that for browser vendors or third
> parties to add MathML, maybe starting with custom elements and custom
> layout via Houdini.
>
> > After 20 years, there's no significant corpus of Content MathML;
> On the Web that's true as far as i can tell too - off the Web it's
> widely used, which is a success story.
>
> That was true for a long time for CSS and for SVG too. I remember
> coming to the SVG spec and (1) finding it full of IDL and thinking it
> wasn't about a markup language, and (2) then going back and trying it
> and finding my browser crashed all the time, and abandoning SVG after a
> really painful month or so of trying to get something working in a
> system that didn't display error messages!
>
> I still suspect the most compelling use case for maths on the Web
> involves mathematics on the Web rather than equations on the Web - as
> has been mentioned in this thread already. Plot a graph, show me the
> long division, make a simple spreadsheet. That's neither LaTeX nor
> MathML really, although it's prolly closer to MathML.
>
> > PS: If you wrote this because you're building an application around
> > Content
> > MathML, then I apologize; it would be great to hear more about it.
>
> Haha i'm afraid not, although it'd for sure be interesting. Although
> Wolfram and Maple are in that sort of space already (without the mathML
>  being central). But no need to apologize in any case :)
>
> Want MathML on the Web?  Make it help with K12 homework. Make it not be
> all or nothing, let's have matrices, fences, roots, maths-style
> stacking superscripts & subscripts. Would splitting MathML up into half
> a dozen sub-specs ala CSS modules actually help?
>
> For sure the eqn-style notation by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry
> [1] (which inspired TeX/LaTeX) is massively, massively easier to type
> by hand than anything XML-based. But we don't have LaTeX widely used on
> the Web either (nor eqn)...
>
> Anyway, thanks for replying, and sorry for my laconic vagueness.
>
> Liam
>
> [1] http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/cacm.ps (1975, revised)
>
> --
> 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/
>