[whatwg] Mathematics in HTML5

James Graham wrote:
> You have to choose your battles and, personally, I 
> agree with the idea that, if the proponents of CSS-based maths want to 
> work in the structure of the WHATWG, they should demonstrate the 
> feasibility of their approach using a microformat. Given the constraints 
> under which they have chosen to operate it should be possible to do this 
> without any  difficulties. 

As I already said several times, when it comes to rendering maths with CSS,
there are no real difference between HTML based microformat and XML application.
Whether fraction will be marked as 
<span class="fraction"><span class="num">numerator</span><span class="den">denominator</span></span>
or
<fraction><num>numerator</num><den>denominator</den></fraction>
does not matter for the purpose of further rendering with CSS.
However it matters for usability, readability and authoring purposes. 
So sending us to microformats.org is basically saying that it is not worth
to allocate separate element names for maths.


> The microformat based approach has several 
> advantages too, e.g. instant implementation in existing HTML4 UAs (a new 
> markup language would require changes to the parser). 

We don't have much problems on parser side.
All existing UAs that have strong CSS support, have XML support too.


> This should allow 
> the language to evolve as it encounters real-world needs so, if and when 
> it is formally standardized, it will be a better product than typically 
> results from an standardization-before-implementation approach.

We prefer parallel process, so what we propose to standardize today can
be consistently rendered today in browsers, later when it will be realistic
to add more features they will be gradually added. We need standardization 
that stimulates implementations and recognizes right of math community
to have presence on web, not standardization for the sake of standardization.
Nor we need separate getto which is not integrated with the rest of web standards.
Isolating mathematical markup from the rest of standards was wrong step that brought
many problems to MathML community.





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Received on Sunday, 18 June 2006 01:38:16 UTC