Re: Whither MathML support?

MathML is definitely not a niche language in educational publishing.  We
have tens millions of dollars of revenue tied to students being able to
read our math, stats, science, econ, and psych texts (to name a few).
Without MathML, our fall back is an SVG, but SVG doesn't have enough
support, so then our fallback becomes png or jpg.  Imagine trying to
navigate your first math text in a digital environment to find that many
inline equations aren't resizing with your text.  Or worse, imagine reading
that text with a screenreader and having to hear someone's complex alt text
interpretation of the equation rather than a standard language
interpretation.

For better or worse, educational publishing is deeply dependent on MathML
even as we provide image fallbacks to MathML in our epubs for those readers
that do not support it...

If there is a better solution for accessible pedagogically appropriate
display of math then I'm all ears, but until then, the treatment of MathML
as niche could be devastating for students.

Rachel Comerford | Director of Content Standards | T 212.576.9433

*Macmillan Learning*

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2017-09-07 at 08:32 -0500, Ric Wright wrote:
> > I agree with most of this.  But IMO there is a large divide between
> > vertical Japanese text and MathML.  One is pretty much a requirement
> > in Japan, while MathML is somewhat of a niche language.
>
> You seriously went all the way through school without having an
> equation in a text book? :)
>
> But yes, I agree there's similarity with SVG. And CSS took a long time
> to catch on too, even though the use of generic styles for markup was
> an integral part of SGML itself.
>
> Best,
>
> Liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, XQuery WG
>
> Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
>
>