Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Review MathML (#313)

It _is_ disappointing that Chrome and Edge do not have native implementations of MathML. That lack has definitely hampered wider deployment of MathML on the web, at least in terms of visual display of math. I am encouraged by recent developments including the work at Igalia that @fred-wang mentioned along with [the announcement from NISO](https://www.niso.org/niso-io/newsline/2018/08/newsline-august-2018) that the Sloan Foundation is sponsoring a project to add MathML support to Chromium.

MathML has greatly enabled accessibility of math on the web. It is now the case that the major screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver) all support MathML as do many math-oriented websites (the MathML is typically invisible/hidden due to the lack of universal display). It is an understated success that someone who is blind can simply open a Wikipedia or Khan Academy page and (mostly) hear the math, review the math by navigating it, and read the math in braille on their refreshable display. The major limiting factor is that not all math in these pages uses MathML, but the vast majority does, especially for larger expressions.  There is no jumping through hoops, no hitting special key combinations, it is simply read as part of the page. 

The web has evolved since MathML first became a recommendation and I think it would be a good idea to work on a V4 for MathML that tackles some pain points in implementation. These include:
* better alignment with CSS and HTML
* detailed specification for layout
* potential addition of attributes to allow semantic "hints" such as subject area or function.

I'm sure other people can extend this list.

As @davidcarlisle and @fred-wang have mentioned, a very good start has already been done for the first two items, a strong indication that these are solvable problems. I agree with @pkra that the web would benefit from adding low level features to CSS and APIs to support math layout. Where I disagree with @pkra is the purpose of adding that support. I feel adding the support would ease the burden that browser developers face in supporting MathML and its math-oriented elements and hence lead to more browser implementations. Using layout support to justify removal of MathML because math can be displayed with styled `<span>`s is not a good idea for HTML5 and especially not for accessibility of math.

The third item in some sense also is already in use. Both MathPlayer (of which I am an author) and @zorkow's semantic enrichment engine in MathJax internally extend MathML to allow generation of more semantically meaningful speech (e.g., recognizing P(A|B) as a probability statement or AB with a line over it as a line segment).  By making such a feature standardized in MathML, authors, authoring tools, and semantic enrichment algorithms could simplify the production of semantic speech in cases where the mathematical presentation is ambiguous. It also could ease the burden on search tools for semantic searching of math for those cases .




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