Re: New menclose notation coming in MathML 3, 2nd edition

On 06/09/2013 09:12, Frédéric WANG wrote:

Frédéric,
thanks for your comments.


> Thanks for the information Neil. I think that should be easy to
> implement, indeed. I'll open bug entries for that. BTW, could you
> also add the "updiagonalarrow" notation to that list ; I proposed it
>  a few months ago to implement the LaTeX cancel package (used for
> example in LaTeXML and MathJax).
>
> First a remark about deprecated unitless values that I mentioned in
> the past. While discussing mfrac@linethickness with a WebKit
> developer recently, I noticed that the examples of mfrac still use
> the deprecated unitless syntax
> (http://www.w3.org/Math/draft-spec/chapter3-d.html#id.3.3.2.3) and
> this caused some confusion. I think it would be worth checking all
> the definitions/examples again and remove the deprecated notations if
> any.

Thanks for the reminder: we should catch those:

in chapter3

mfrac example has
linethickness="2" and linethickness="4"

and the text states

a value of "0" renders without the bar such as for binomial coefficients.

I suppose that should be

linethickness="200%" and linethickness="400%"

a value of "0pt" renders without the bar such as for binomial coefficients.



There several examples using <mo maxsize="1"> to limit stretchiness
again I suppose they should be <mo maxsize="100%>

the text

<p>Note that each parenthesis is sized independently; if only one of
them had maxsize="1", they would render with different
sizes.</p>

would then need changing to match.

>
> I don't how many new features you can add to the new edition, but
> MathJax currently attaches some CSS classes to MathML elements to
> implement non-standard features and I'm wondering if they can be
> standardized. The "updiagonalarrow" was one of them, now fixed in


As a rough guide, we don't want to change the schema in a "second
edition" so any schema breaking changes go on a wish list for a 3.1 or
4, but unless that list gets unbearably long, the current intention is
to just do a "3.0 second edition".

the list of notations is open in the schema so adding updiagonalarrow
is a possibility (same as the phasor angle notation of Neil's message)

> v2.2. Another one is to emulate TeX spacing, but that will be
> perharps a bit complicate to consider for a second edition and
> probably not wanted for now.

How close a TeX emulation do you have in mind?


>
> One issue that was raised several times in the past is the
> mathvariant attribute:
>
> "Renderers should support those combinations of character data and
> mathvariant values that correspond to Unicode characters, and that
> they can visually distinguish using available font characters.
> Renderers may ignore or support those combinations of character data
>  and mathvariant values that do not correspond to an assigned Unicode
>  code point".
>
> One paragraph mentions that CSS, when available, may be used to
> implement mathvariant. This has caused some "style vs mathvariant"
> confusions in the past especially since MathJax and browsers
> currently only implement them via font-style/font-family/font-weight
>  changes and they are probably not always "protected from inadvertent
>  document-wide style changes".
>
> While working on math fonts recently, it seems that many of them have
> characters from these "Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols" block as
> well as other alphanumeric glyphs that are not accessible via
> Unicode. In the STIX fonts, that's a bit messy: many glyphs are
> duplicate between the reserved mathvariant code points and the
> various styles (-Regular, -Italic, -Bold, -BoldItalic), probably to
> work with the style-based implementations ; and the STIX fonts also
> have some non-Unicode glyphs (e.g. PUA characters for italic
> double-struck in STIX-Italic). In other cases, there is only one
> single "math" font and the style-based implementation can not work ;
>  so we need a mechanism to access all the glyphs especially the
> non-Unicode ones. That's generally not a problem for MathJax: because
> of various technical issues we must split the (free) fonts and
> reorganize the glyphs in different code points if we want to add
> support for these fonts. However it's currently not possible to
> implement \mathcal and \oldstyle in MathJax (without adding
> non-standard CSS class) and it's a problem for other rendering
> engines that would like to support mathvariant for arbitrary math
> fonts. So here are two changes that I'd like people to consider:
>
> 1) Mention that renderers are allowed to pick non-Unicode glyphs from
> a font for combinations that do not correspond to an assigned Unicode
> code point. For example, if a font contains a non-Unicode glyph that
> represents a bold plus sign then this glyph can be used to render <mo
> mathvariant="bold">+</mo>. That's already implicitly allowed in the
> description, but that would provide a suggestion for implementers.
> Also, that seemed to be the only way to implement the Arabic ones
> when they were proposed
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/NOTE-arabic-math-20060131/arabic.xhtml)


It might be (is) tricky to mention PUA characters in the spec.
In MathML 1, prior to the math characters being added to Unicode
(over a thousand at Unicode 3.1 and 3.2, and a few more at each release
since then) MathML was based on PUA assignments (aligned with the
original stix submission). To say this was controversial would be
putting it mildly. To say in a spec that PUA characters can be used for
anything puts the whole spec in danger of being rejected. The wording
introduced at MathML2 that strongly tied mathvariant to a mapping of
Unicode code points (rather than to font changes) was worked out over
long discussions with the W3C Accessibility experts who were as a group
totally opposed to any in-markup font style as opposed to external CSS 
styling.


>
> 2) Allow mathvariant values "calligraphic" and "oldnumerals". It's a
>  bit controversial given that it's not clear if they have a specific
>  mathematical semantics or are just stylistic changes (see for
> example
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-math/2006Jul/0013.html and
> comments at the end of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures#History). However, for
> most of the mathvariant notations (except perhaps fraktur or
> double-struck) the implied mathematical semantics is not clear to me
>  and most of them only looks like stylistic changes that can be used
>  to provide a distinct mathematical meaning in some contexts (for
> example some physicists use bold to indicate a vector). At least,
> \mathcal and \oldstyle have been used in LaTeX and probably some
> people have used them to provide a distinguish mathematical meaning
> in the context of their papers. Certainly the logical class is not
> obvious but the same is true for values like monospace, sans-serif or
> (for me) the Arabic variants.

This is similar to the above point in a way: calligraphic was
deliberately unified with script when the unicode math alphabets were
added. One can argue whether that was a good choice but it was the
decision Unicode took. MathML is more or less forced by design to follow
Unicode. Which means that script and calligraphic are considered font
variants of the math script block. To argue to Unicode that there should
be a Calligraphic alphabet one would probably need to find published
mathematical articles using Script and Calligraphic in the same
expression with different meanings. (That may not be impossibly hard to
find). This is similar to getting dotless j added, we needed to
reference published works that used a dotless j on its own, rather than
as a base for an accented j (most of which were already in Unicode).

Since you'd presumably want to implement these with css font changes 
anyway, one possibility would be to standardise separately (in a note, 
say) css class names for mathml, so

<mi class="calligraphic" mathvariant="script">C</mi>

  (I don't know, just first thoughts)

David
[speaking for myself not for the working group]

Received on Friday, 6 September 2013 14:49:44 UTC