RE: Math Working Group Charter

@Fred: I think you are taking what I said to the extreme and then countering it. All I am suggesting is that it is possible to view this activity from a different perspective. The more people see the Web Platform as a platform for delivering apps of all kinds, the more the Web Platform will become like a traditional OS. Of course, the details will be different as the technologies have changed. I am definitely not arguing for implementing low-level text layout in JS. However, it is usually a bad idea for any one group to define what facilities the OS needs. It has to fulfill the needs of a variety of imaginative parties and not narrow things down to some small set of preconceived app types.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frédéric WANG [mailto:fred.wang@free.fr]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 10:22 PM
> To: www-math@w3.org
> Subject: 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 16:37:53 UTC