[HN Gopher] Igalia will restart their (Chrome) MathML work in Q2...
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Igalia will restart their (Chrome) MathML work in Q2 2021
Author : mindcrime
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-02-27 21:44 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathml.igalia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathml.igalia.com)
| abhinav22 wrote:
| I cannot upvote this enough. It is a hugely crucial project to
| get MathML on Chrome.
|
| I don't think W3C gets enough love, the standards for CSS and
| HTML have provided one of the most awesome foundations for
| information delivery. Corporations are trying to take away open
| web from us, but like the FOSS movement, I'm super proud that
| humanity has at least until now had an open web, and that partly
| is due to the great work of W3C standardizing web languages.
|
| Chrome really dropped the ball on MathML - yes MathJax is amazing
| (side note: I just released my own rich text web editor that is
| powered by MathJax - https://writer.math.dev), but we all know
| that MathML is a key chance to have a standardized form of
| recording digital math. I am very specific in saying recording
| and not inputting as MathML is not suitable for human input in
| most cases, but as a XML like markup, it is great for recording
| digitally. AsciiMath to me is the best way to input math.
|
| I would love to support this project, but I wasn't able to find a
| smaller donation amount section (let me know).
|
| I really hope the team are able to get Chrome to adopt MathML.
| jfim wrote:
| MathML support was removed eight years ago from Chrome,
| actually. See
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430...
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Thanks - yes, I know; but good to see the original source of
| the discussion vs reading from blogs etc.
|
| Math is used so widely in the sciences, I'm very disappointed
| that Google didn't put some resources to get MathML working
| in Chrome. It has really hampered online math publishing :(
| MathJax is great, but it's slow and not a native to the
| browser.
| Jyaif wrote:
| I don't believe that MathML should be integrated in a browser:
| MathML does not requires a lot of CPU, so you can get away with
| JS+canvas that implements the MathML spec.
|
| By having it in the browser you are making the browser more
| bloated (more disk space, more memory, more cache misses) and
| possibly less stable/secure, even-though less than 1% of the
| people are going to use this feature. Other issues include
| increasing the barrier of entry for new browsers, having to
| deal with differences in implementation of MathML when using
| it, and making the spec harder to improve.
| malthejorgensen wrote:
| Totally agree - KaTeX is good enough. Browser implementors
| should spend their time on other things.
| runarberg wrote:
| Browser implementors have been spending their time on other
| things. People have been asking for chrome support for
| almost a decade now. I believe MathML support in Firefox is
| entirely due to volunteers. And as you see from this post
| Chrome support is being implemented by Igalia, not the
| Chromium core developers.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| There's so much bloat in Browsers already though. And
| millions of school children study math, so there's a big
| market for online mathematics.
|
| I agree with you that the solution needs to be a good one,
| you don't want a standard that is difficult to implement
| across browsers or is inefficient / bad. I'm no expert so I
| can't comment on MathML, but I am just hopeful that some
| standardized math format can be agreed on; and web standards
| have the best chance for this --- hence its important for
| Chrome to implement what is a W3C standard. My opinion
| anyway.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| This is an argument against any and all changes.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Yes, but why? I would say 99% of users don't look at math in the
| browser. MathJax is doing a fantastic job here.
|
| The biggest benefit of using things like MathJax: Predictable and
| similar results in all browsers. Just think about fonts and
| spacing for example.
|
| MathML rendering support is and was broken when looking at all
| browser vendors.
|
| What needs more browser support in all browsers are other things
| like JPEG XL.
| runarberg wrote:
| I think once the standard is fully implemented across browsers
| authors will be able to define a font-family and the results
| should be visually similar in all browsers. I think this is
| preferable to authors in case they want a specific font family
| that matches the overall design.
|
| As an example take a look at my doc page for MathUp[1] in
| firefox (which supports MathML natively). I am able to use
| Libertinus as my main font family and compliment it beautifully
| with Libertinus Mono for code samples and Libertinus Math for
| the math samples.
|
| 1: https://runarberg.github.io/mathup/
| abhinav22 wrote:
| MathJax should be implemented directly within Browsers vs a
| slow JS package.
|
| However to answer your question, I separate MathML from
| MathJax. MathML is a data model for math, MathJax is a renderer
| - both should co exist and complement each other. Most other
| vendors are supporting MathML, Chrome by not supporting it, has
| pushed it away from being a standard.
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(page generated 2021-02-27 23:01 UTC)