Re: Whither MathML support?

Hi,

I have a couple questions that bother me about this issue. First was the 
issue of accessibility. It has seemed as there is no way to have a 
semantic version of Math and presentation together. Is there ever going 
to be a single solution for Math that has just one version for both as 
HTML text has had (especially in HTML5)?

The second question, and as a strong supporter of XML, is it possible to 
semantically represent math with XML? For example, there is no real way 
to have page and line numbers in XML as well as paragraphs that span 
them, as this breaks nestedness. The fixes for this are problematic 
within XML. Is math intrinsically impossible to represent in XML? Or is 
it just so difficult there is no solution that can be both semantic and 
presentation? And is there an XSLT possible that can transform them in 
either direction?

Sorry if the answers are obvious, but I had not heard of them.

Daniel



On 9/7/2017 12:56 PM, Rachel Comerford wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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/
>
>