[HN Gopher] Bringing MathML back to Chromium
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Bringing MathML back to Chromium
Author : ubavic
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-01-10 20:46 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.igalia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.igalia.com)
| vehemenz wrote:
| MathML's removal in 2013 in Chrome was a huge deal in the
| accessibility community. Fixing the bugs and vulnerabilities of
| MathML in blink would have been entirely possible with Google's
| resources. In hindsight, it's easy to see why--now we consider
| Google an ad company first--but back then it was truly
| bewildering, given that Firefox continued their support of
| MathML.
|
| There was a big push at the time for native presentational
| MathML, and Chrome basically undercut it completely. MathJax
| picked up some of the slack, but it was never a true replacement.
| Either way, it's nice see presentational MathML is back.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _MathML 's removal in 2013 in Chrome was a huge deal in the
| accessibility community_
|
| That sounds ahistorical to me. Maybe removal of the (potential)
| _promise_ of future MathML from Chrome was a huge deal?
|
| MathML support across browsers in 2013 was very spotty and
| buggy (there's a reason that even back then MathJax didn't
| prioritize MathML output), but the accessibility story was
| atrocious.
|
| That's actually slowly changing for the better now. Some
| background and planning here: https://w3c.github.io/mathml-
| docs/gap-analysis/
| vehemenz wrote:
| "Ahistorical" is not the word you're looking for, and even if
| it were, you're incorrect.
|
| Firefox and Internet Explorer (with a third party plugin)
| both had support for MathML reading for screen readers. The
| support wasn't complete, but it was good enough for high
| school level math in HTML textbooks. I produced several dozen
| of these, so I should know.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _" Ahistorical" is not the word you're looking for, and
| even if it were, you're incorrect._
|
| In the sense that there were certainly people lamenting the
| feature loss, yes, in the sense that there were large parts
| of the accessibility community actually using MathML and
| left without an alternative, no. It was largely not usable
| (Igalia has been fixing MathML bugs in Firefox and WebKit
| as well), let alone in an accessible fashion.
|
| > _The support wasn 't complete, but it was good enough for
| high school level math in HTML textbooks_
|
| Maybe _basic_ algebra, but that would be it. The document I
| linked gives some good basic examples even screen readers
| today trip over due to their inherent ambiguity (as
| rendered and /or as markup). Anything beyond that you
| currently have to annotate yourself, and you can do that
| just as easily without a native markup dialect.
| est31 wrote:
| > now we consider Google an ad company first
|
| Google has been an ad company way before 2013.
|
| AdWords was launched in 2000. Google bought DoubleClick in
| 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
|
| Second paragraph of the Google 2004 financial report (first
| paragraph described what Google is): We
| generate revenue by delivering relevant, cost-effective online
| advertising. Businesses use our AdWords program to promote
| their products and services with targeted advertising. In
| addition, the thousands of third-party web sites that comprise
| our Google Network use our Google AdSense program to deliver
| relevant ads that generate revenue and enhance the user
| experience.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...
| afloyd wrote:
| Note they did not say "Google is now an ad company", it was
| "now we consider Google an ad company first", it is a matter
| of perception.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > it's easy to see why--now we consider Google an ad company
| first--but back then it was truly bewildering
|
| ?
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I like it.
|
| Here you can have a look at the syntax as well as the
| corresponding results: https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core/
|
| Maybe a LaTeX to MathML converter would be decent.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| LaTeX to MathML converters already exist: https://fred-
| wang.github.io/TeXZilla/
| kccqzy wrote:
| > "This is the first example I know of that a major, major
| feature is really coming to the Web despite there not really
| being a business case for the business that normally advance the
| Web," said Rick Byers of the Chrome team at Google.
|
| Paraphrased: It doesn't make money, so why do it?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's a bit of a weird quote because it's not at all apparent
| how business cases for markup features would be decided on.
| Chrome is full of stuff that isn't obviously beneficial to
| Google's core business (WebXR? WebMIDI?), yet MathML is about
| enhancing the parseability of information in crawlable
| documents which you'd expect to be a priority for a search
| company.
| csande17 wrote:
| Standards like WebMIDI are used for fingerprinting.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's not good for Google though. They have an incentive
| to not allow fingerprinting, both because it's illegal so
| they don't do it, and also because most people are logged
| into Chrome so they don't need to do it.
| csande17 wrote:
| Do you have a source on fingerprinting being illegal? A
| lot of website privacy policies mention that they will
| collect "information about your device hardware
| configuration" or similar language.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| This makes me sad about the state of the Web. Worst thing is,
| it can't be fixed because the major money makers dictate where
| the 90% mindshare falls.
| [deleted]
| sideeffffect wrote:
| The history of that ticket is really mind-blowing
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606
| [deleted]
| runarberg wrote:
| Congratulations to the igalia team here for amazing work. I've
| been waiting to use MathML natively for years and thanks to a lot
| of hard work this is finally possible.
| SinePost wrote:
| I'm a big believer of treating mathematical notation as a first-
| class citizen on the web. This won't make me jump ship to a
| Chromium-based browser, but I'm glad to see it happen.
| college_physics wrote:
| 100% this. Bit for bit math is the densest representation of
| knowledge invented by the human mind. Its a pity so many people
| switch off and never "get it" as they crawl in our current
| educational systems. Maybe making it easily available on the
| web will help at least a little.
| owlbite wrote:
| MathML always seemed like a waste of time. It was/is objectively
| worse on every axis (at least from a user perspective) compared
| to the long-established LaTeX notation.
| runarberg wrote:
| This is just wrong. MathML is not about notation, it is about
| rendering. Notation is secondary (as is evidence by the number
| of translators out there). Having native rendering yields
| numerous benefits including:
|
| * Less works for developers who no longer need to pick,
| integrate, and maintain a third party library for rendering.
|
| * Faster user experience, as the MathML code can be served
| directly and rendered by the browser (as opposed to parsed and
| rendered with the javascript engine).
|
| * More options. Maybe LaTeX is not the right choice of syntax
| (more people write math then professional mathematicians and
| PhD students). As translating to LaTeX is hard, translating to
| MathML is easier (I know, I've written one my self).
| magicalist wrote:
| User as in reader? That's definitely not true. It becomes
| integrated into the document (vs a rasterized image), can
| copy/paste, etc.
|
| User as in author? That's true, but latex -> mathml conversion
| already exists and is decent, and will get increased attention
| now that the major browsers all support it to a baseline level.
| vehemenz wrote:
| MathML has more capabilities than the ad hoc notation of LateX
| simply in virtue of being XML-based. Whether these capabilities
| are ever realized is another question, but LaTeX had a pretty
| big head start and better tools.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I don't think MathML is designed for human creation, it's
| somewhat human readable but I believe the main goal was to
| remove the possibility of ambiguities.
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