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

We are talking about the implementation of MathML into the browsers. If we are going to do it, do it well, please! Otherwise it will be switch off again.

MathML has been criticized for being monolithic. What does it mean? My interpretation is that once you start writing MathML tags, you enter a different world with respect to HTML. The rules are not the same: some CSS do not work, you cannot mix other HTML tags, the font typesetting changes, etc. Can this be improved? If there is a general agreement about something we do not like about MathML, we can fix it. It is not easy but doable.

Another important property of HTML is that the layout provided by most of the current HTML tags are also available as CSS properties. See display=table|list-item|… or vertical-align=sup|super . Following this idea, it would be great to have display=fraction, display=underover and so on. These layouts would render any HTML element in a similar way as MathML but without some of the MathML limitations: you can use any HTML element as a child, the CSS styles are always applied in a standard way, the font typesetting does not change (or any style in general), the resulting fragment does not have semantics or accessibility implications (unless you add explicitly ARIA attributes), etc.



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