- From: Paul Topping <pault@dessci.com>
- Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2016 18:36:54 +0000
- To: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- CC: Avneesh Singh <avneesh.sg@gmail.com>, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>, W3C Digital Publishing IG <public-digipub-ig@w3.org>, Peter Krautzberger <peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org>
Except when the person using the UA needs math accessibility. Accessibility requires that the rendering be customized for the individual. The text to be spoken for a mathematical expression is different for a student learning math than for a scientist who already understands the math. This is mostly easily achieved via client-side implementation, though it is technically feasible to implement such a feature at the server with perhaps degradation in quality and higher latency. Since the user has to navigate around the math, latency is a particular issue. For practical reasons, delivering MathML to the UA works best. Finally, this is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Publishers want to deliver MathML but, as most are in education, they also have to serve all users and can't usually dictate the user's browser. Paul > -----Original Message----- > From: Tab Atkins Jr. [mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com] > Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2016 11:02 AM > To: Paul Topping <pault@dessci.com> > Cc: Avneesh Singh <avneesh.sg@gmail.com>; Florian Rivoal > <florian@rivoal.net>; www-style list <www-style@w3.org>; W3C Digital > Publishing IG <public-digipub-ig@w3.org>; Peter Krautzberger > <peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org> > Subject: Re: [mediaqueries] MathML > > On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Paul Topping <pault@dessci.com> wrote: > > I will admit to not being an expert on media queries but is the state of > MathML implementation in browsers really a deciding factor on whether > there should be a math MQ? I appreciate there's a difficulty in deciding how > good an implementation must be but that is surely a problem shared by > other complex media types. Isn't MathML's value in accessibility enough to > justify the creation of a math MQ? > > No. The deciding factor is whether people actually want to *use* MathML > for displaying equations, in the UAs that support it. Based on discussion with > publishers, it looks like the answer is "not really", because of the poor quality > of implementations; they'd rather use MathML with a high-quality renderer > to produce the equation once, then just use the rendered result directly, as > it means they don't have to test all the UAs to ensure every equation display > correctly. > (Contrast this with SVG - the implementation quality for SVG is sufficient that > people are fine with using it as a display format directly, even tho rendering it > to a raster image would give them more control and assurance that it was > correct.) > > Every feature we add has a cost, and must be justified by sufficient benefit. > If MathML simple isn't being used much as a display format, then we don't > need to worry about catering to it yet. Yes, this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg > issue, but most things are; we can't preemptively support everything just in > case one of them becomes popular. > > ~TJ
Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2016 18:37:49 UTC