RE: Math Working Group Charter

Hi Adam,

There are a number of places where MathML touches the so-called Web Platform, consisting of HTML5 and related standards. This extends to ebooks and EPUB in particular. Just off the top of my head, these places include:


-          The apparent move away from XSL-FO toward CSS for so-called paged media, a subset of which is ebooks. There were two papers on this at last week’s XML Prague conference.

-          Web fonts. There might be areas where this technology could be improved for math.

-          Web components. This has the potential to be a good mechanism for implementing a MathML fallback when the browser does not implement MathML natively. I know the MathJax guys have looked at this. Work here might allow MathJax and other implementations to handle MathML more transparently. Ideally, MathML in the page would behave the same way regardless of whether the browser’s implementation was native or not.

-          Accessibility. The world seems to be moving away from AT that must plug into each browser using its extension mechanism toward one in which the interface is JavaScript and other Web Platform standards. There might need to be some contributions from the MWG here.

I don’t know if this kind of thing has appeal and/or whether it should be the domain of the Math Working Group or some other W3C effort.

Paul Topping

Design Science, Inc.
"How Science Communicates"
Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathDaisy, MathPlayer, Equation Editor
http://www.dessci.com




From: Adam Sobieski [mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2014 1:14 AM
To: www-math@w3.org
Subject: Math Working Group Charter

Math Working Group,

Greetings.  As some of you might be aware, the Math Working Group charter commenced in 2006 and the charter, extended in March of 2012 and March of 2013, expires in March of 2014 (http://www.w3.org/Math/Documents/Charter2006.html).

I was wondering whether any others might be interested in discussing the charter and some of the tasks ahead, in this mailing list, and, beyond extending the charter, expanding the charter.

The case for continuing the Math Working Group as a chartered W3C Working Group is clear; Web-related use cases have been indicated since before 1995, advancing scholarly and scientific communication, and, with digital books and textbooks upcoming, there are important new use cases to consider.  It is posited that a discussion can be phrased as about whether to extend or to expand the Math Working Group charter, and, if to expand the charter, in which ways to expand the charter, towards including which tasks overlapping with the work of other groups and towards including which tasks not overlapping with the work of any other group.

Topics for discussion include, but are not limited to, the production, improvement and versioning of formats, interfaces, and features for the input, semantics, indexing, search and retrieval, processing, exchange, presentation and visualization of logical, mathematical, scientific, notational and diagrammatic knowledge and content.  Topics include, but are not limited to, scholarly and scientific communication and education.  I would like to broach with colleagues in this mailing list the topics of the Working Group charter and, beyond extending the charter, expanding the Math Working Group charter.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski