[MathOnWeb] what do you expect for 2019?

Hi everyone,

As we did last year, let's try for a thread with thoughts on the coming
year and what we might focus on within this CG.

I'll start below.

Best,
Peter.

I think 2019 will be a difficult year for the CG. The main problem is the
recently re-opened arguing around "native" MathML support in browser. I
expect this to continue to have a negative impact on this group and the
wider community.

I wished there was an easy way to make a clear cut and simply have all
"native" MathML fans take it elsewhere. But there isn't. Too many people
(myself included) consider MathML a useful spec to capture print layout in
an XML context (and thus critical for legacy content) and for them it will
be difficult not to care if the spec ends up being damaged in another
attempt to "bless" problematic browser implementations (remember Presto?).

The second and sadly related problem is that the number of active group
members has dropped recently. As Tzviya likes to say: standards are made by
those who show up - and people aren't. Some of this has to do with the
constant arguing around MathML. Since math on the web is a very small niche
(and that won't change), there are very few people willing and able to work
towards standardization, and even fewer who can afford to spend their time
on standards work. I would like to encourage everyone on this group to be
more mindful of this.

What could the group work on in its current state? Some ideas:

1) Being a good space for the community. I was surprised with how often the
CG telcos end up helping individuals who show up one time. I think the
group can do more to be a place where the community gathers openly.

2) The accessibility task force has mostly joined the ARIA WG directly.
That's a good move for now to keep things focused while moving up in the
standards process. My personal favorite would be to get separate Braille
streams moving forward but ther are other ways to make a positive impact on
the web platform this year.

3) The CSS task force had a productive meeting with the CSS WG at TPAC and
if there's progress on even a single item from our TPAC list it would be a
significant step for the web as a whole.

4) Given the recent news about AsciiDoc working towards standardizing its
syntax, I'd like to try to re-open the linear notation task force. I could
imagine both AsciiMath and TeX-style syntax for the web could benefit from
some standardization.

5) I would also like for the CG try to live up to its scope which is all
mathematics (and possibly large chunks of scientific content) are part of
it. Equation layout is a solved problem (even if separate braille streams
are still on the todo list). Let's stop obsessing over it and think about
other content or technologies (e.g., computational improvements to the web
platform). I plan to follow up on my theorem-related posting a while back
and perhaps other people have topics they're itching to discuss more
broadly.

Alright, that might be a decent start.

Best,
Peter.