Hi,
Summary: MathML is a vestigial remnant of the XML-everything era, and we
should drop it.
***
1. Reasons why I believe that MathML never was a good idea. Summary:
over-specialized and uniformly inferior to the pre-existing,
well-established standard, TeX.
1.1. MathML is too specialized: we should be reluctant to have a
separate spec for every kind of specialized typography. What if musicians
wanted their own MusicML too?
1.2. MathML reinvents the wheel, poorly. A suitable subset of TeX (not
the entirety of TeX, as that is a huge, single-implementation technology
that reputedly only Knuth ever fully understood) was the right choice all
along, because:
1.2.1. TeX is already the universally adopted standard --- and
already was long before MathML was invented. Check for yourself on
http://arxiv.org/ , where most new math papers are uploaded --- pick any
article, then "other" formats, then "Source": you can then download TeX
sources for almost every article.
1.2.2. TeX is very friendly to manual writing, being concise and
close to natural notation, with limited overhead (some backslashes and
curly braces), while MathML is as tedious to handwrite as any other
XML-based format. An example is worked out at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Example_and_comparison_to_other_formats,
where the solution to the quadratic equation is one line of TeX versus
30
lines of MathML!
1.2.3. An important corollary of being very close to natural notation
is that TeX can be nearly trivially "read aloud". That means that it offers
a particularly easy accessibility story. No matter what mechanism is used
to graphically display equations, providing the TeX source (similarly to
images alt text) would allow anyone to quickly read it themselves without
any kind of software support; and screen reading software could properly
read equations with minimal TeX-specific support code. For example, TeX
code such as "\int_0^1 x^2 dx" can be readily understood by any human with
basic TeX exposure (which is nearly 100% of mathematicians) and can be
easily handled by any screen reader that knows that \int should be read as
"integral" and that immediately after it, _ and ^ should be read as "from"
and "to" respectively.
***
2. Reasons why even if MathML had ever been a decent idea, now would be the
right time to drop it. Summary: never really got traction, and the same
rendering can now be achieved without MathML support.
2.1. MathML never saw much traction outside of Mozilla, despite having
been around for a decade. WebKit only got a very limited partial
implementation recently, and Google removed it from Blink. The fact that it
was just dropped from Blink says much about how little it's used: Google
wouldn't have disabled a feature that's needed to render web pages in the
real world. Opera got an implementation too, but Opera's engine has been
phased out.
2.2. High-quality mathematical typography in browsers is now possible,
without using MathML. Examples include MathJax ( http://www.mathjax.org/ ),
which happily takes either TeX or MathML input and renders it without
specific browser support, and of course PDF.js which is theoretically able
to render all PDFs including those generated by pdftex. Both approaches
give far higher quality output than what any current MathML browser
implementation offers.
***
3. Proposals
Assuming that there will be agreement to drop MathML, I can see us doing
either of two things:
3.1. Either just drop MathML support; the assumption would be that
current solutions not requiring specific browser support, such as MathJax
or PDF.js, are sufficient;
3.2. Or drop MathML support and create a new specification, that would
be based on a suitable subset of TeX.
In both approaches, distributing TeX source code alongside with a page is
highly desirable because it is the preferred source form of most math
content and because it enables good accessibility as discussed above. In
the 3.1 approach, that would be like alt text on images: something that
many authors would omit in practice. In the 3.2 approach, that would be the
document itself, which means that it couldn't be neglected.
The big problem with 3.2. is the same issue as we described in 1.1: any
math-specific system may well be over-specialized. Then again, TeX is not
exclusively restricted to math typography, and it has been used for e.g.
music typography before. So to some extent that I haven't precisely figured
yet, the 1.1 overspecialization against MathML may not fully apply against
a TeX-based solution.
Benoit
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