Re: [MathOnWeb] agenda and call-in details for Thursday, Jan 18, 2018

Following up as per the discussion at the end of the call yesterday...

In addition to a taskforce/workstream focused on improving CSS for math
layout, the second taskforce/workstream I suggested is one that would focus
on machine-readable formats of math for the following purposes:

- software interchange (i.e. being able to copy/paste, send/receive data
from a service). Imagine a web service that provides computation services,
perhaps plotting of mathematical function. How would you represent the
function to plot? What is the JSON equivalent for math?

- other software processing, for example for accessibility (spoken or
braille representation of math)

There are several existing formats in use for these purposes today,
including LaTeX and MathML. Could these formats be improved or could they
be further standardize to better serve these use cases, in combination
perhaps to improvements to other standards such as ARIA. This would also be
an opportunity to tackle and clarify the role of MathML for math on the web.


To give this more context, the way I envision math on the web in the future
is as follow:

- the "presentation" of math done with HTML and CSS (with suitable CSS
enhancements, as there are lacunas today), accompanied with an out of band,
optional but recommended, machine readable description of the formula
(similar to the ALT tag of an IMG element). This should require the least
effort from browser vendors to implement, and have the greater chance of
broad adoption. I also believe this solution should not require the use of
scripting. The required CSS/HTML could be generated dynamically on the
server, or by an authoring tool at authoring time. In the future, a
solution could be implemented based on web components/Houdini, but it would
require the same improvements that are needed today to do the display from
HTML and CSS, since it would essentially move the work that can be done
today on the server in a locally packaged component.

- interactive math (such as editing) done with HTML, CSS (relying on the
same enhancements as above) and Javascript. This would seem consistent with
accepted use of Javascript on the web for interactive/dynamic content.


Finally, as a follow up on another point of discussion in the call, I
looked at the implementation of stretchable fences in mj3. As far as I can
tell, it uses an implementation very similar to what I'm using in MathLive,
namely, multiple fonts with symbols of different sizes up to a certain
point, then constructing the fences by stacking end caps and a stretched
middle portion. This is fine, and all that logic can be done in Javascript.
You could argue, I suppose, that an author who wishes to write formulas
without Javascript could do the same kind of gymnastics, but I still think
that having stretchable fences that could be described in CSS so that the
browser's layout engine could do these calculations would be valuable. As
an illustration, I would argue that writing CSS/HTML by hand to render the
following is non-trivial, because of the fences:
\begin{pmatrix}
    x_{11}&x_{12}&x_{13}&.&.&.&x_{1n}\\
   x_{21}&x_{22}\\
   x_{31}&x_{32}\\
   x_{41}&x_{42}\\
   x_{51}&x_{52}\\
   x_{61}&x_{62}\\
   x_{71}&x_{72}
\end{pmatrix}


I'm not sure on what next step would make sense here. Personally, this is
not something I need in MathLive, since I have a solution that works just
fine. I believe this is something that would benefit the greater community
of math on web authors, and could help achieve the goal I outlined above of
displaying math content using only CSS and HTML, but I didn't get the sense
that there was a lot of enthusiasm from this group regarding this.

Best,
Arno.






On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 9:13 AM, Peter Krautzberger <peter@krautzource.com>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> We are scheduled to meet on Thursday at 12pm Eastern.
>
> Since appear.in is now restricted to 4 participants, it's not useful
> solution anymore. For now, we'll switch back to Google Hangouts, see [1]
> below.
>
> Best,
> Peter
>
> # Agenda
>
> * review call for comments
> * plan potential task forces for 2018
>
> [1] https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/krautzource.com/mathonweb
>