Re: Math Working Group Charter

@Paul: I think the idea behind the Web platform is to extend the Web 
with higher-level functionalities using Javascript and other HTML5 
technologies (including MathML) not to reinvent the wheel by 
implementing all the low-level browser features (although I won't be 
surprised that some JS extremists want that). So since you moved the 
discussion to text rendering, note that it is one of the most complex 
part of browser layout and I don't believe anyone is crazy enough to try 
to reimplement it in Javascript by positioning individual glyphs with 
<span>'s etc. By extension, this is true for math rendering which can be 
seen as some complex text layout. Even if the lack of interest of some 
browser vendors has lead people to rely on polyfills to fill the gap 
here, this is not justified from a purely technical point of view.

So concretely to come back to the case of science, I believe the idea 
behind the Web platform is to rely on native HTML5 features like MathML, 
SVG or WebGL in order to create higher level features to easily do 
TeX-to-MathML conversion, graph drawings, 3D schemas etc and not to do 
low level math layout, which is one thing MathML was designed for. IIUC, 
that's the aspect the MathJax project would like to progressively focus 
on once the native MathML issue is fixed. This is also the kind of 
higher level API that I'm sometimes missing for my EPUB samples.

-- 
Frédéric Wang
MathML Crowdfunding: ulule.com/mathematics-ebooks

Received on Wednesday, 19 February 2014 06:22:55 UTC