RE: Help get math turned back on in Chrome

Rather than worry about whether there's common interest, I think it is in MathJax and DSI's interest in trying to draw attention to this problem. We don't need to characterize others interest but simply speak our own opinion of the problem and that we expect many others will care about it also. Even if they don't care, our statement would not be wrong.

After you two come back from your trip, let's talk about how to do such a campaign.

Paul

From: Peter Krautzberger [mailto:peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 10:36 AM
To: Neil Soiffer
Cc: www-math@w3.org
Subject: Re: Help get math turned back on in Chrome

It's sad news indeed, especially given the efforts from to prevent this.

I'm wondering if there's interest in drafting a common statement that people could re-use.

Peter.

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Neil Soiffer <NeilS@dessci.com<mailto:NeilS@dessci.com>> wrote:
Chrome 24 had MathML in it.  But they plan to turn it off in Chrome 25!!!

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430#c32

says
Note that MathML has had to be turned off because the code is not
yet production ready. We hope to turn it on in some future release.
We plan to announce this in the Chrome 25 release notes.

This is because of a minor layout bug for which a fix has already been submitted.  Apparently the folks at google don't care about math much and just want to see it die -- the support that is in there was done by someone who volunteered his time for a year and finally had to go back to doing paid work.
One easy step to show your support for math in Chrome is to go to the above link and click on the star in the above left and to get everyone else you know to do the same.  That says you care about this bug being fixed.
A harder step is to find a way to get google to wake up to the reality that math is used in the classroom everyday and is one of the three "r"s (as the saying goes in the US). Not supporting it is a disservice to education around the world and to science, math, and engineering in general. So blog about Chrome's killing math support, tweet about, or create the next viral video about it.
If you care about math support in browsers, do something to show you care!
     Neil Soiffer