On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 11:30:51AM -0700, mscl...@googlemail.com wrote:
> On Monday, 6 May 2013 14:12:48 UTC+1, Trevor Saunders wrote:
> > On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 08:24:07AM -0400, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> >
> > > >I am still waiting for the rebuttal of my arguments, in the original
> > > >email
> > > >in this thread, about how TeX is strictly better than MathML for the
> > > >particular task of representing equations.
> > >
> > > How easy is it to build an accessibility application on top of TeX,
> > > or even a restricted subset of it? Note that these exist for
> > > MathML, but not so much for TeX.
> >
> > I actually think it would be easier to map tx math into the
> > accessibility APIs we support than mathml.
>
> There are several problems/issues here:
>
> # Context
>
> How do you differentiate/identify math powers (e.g. "a^2"), footnotes (e.g.
> "some text^1") and code ("int c = a^b;")?
the same way the tx parser does, though that would be a problem for the
API consumer to deal with not us.
> With MathML markup, you have clearly identified what the content of the
> document/sub-tree is.
>
> # Parsing
>
> With a TeX-like format, a speech synthesiser/screen reader/web browser would
> need to write a parser for that format.
>
> With MathML, the parsing is already handled by the SGML/XML/HTML5 parser so
> the application can process it via DOM/SAX/a reader API.
which has just changed the problem from parsing text to parsing a tree
of objects.
> > currently we don't expose mathml at all other than as a an object that
> > we say is an equation, and its not really clear how to fix that with
> > mathml.
>
> This is enough information for the screen reader/speech synthesiser to know
> that it has MathML content, and thus walk the MathML DOM to read the math out
> loud. It should also be enough to query associated CSS styles to handle any
> Aural CSS or CSS Speech styles associated with the MathML.
No it is not. Ignoring various evil things we'd really rather they
didn't do they can't touch the DOM itself.
> Another important consideration is existing web content. If you are going to
> start rendering text that has e.g. "a^2" as math, then all documents that use
> that, e.g. "<p>You can use a^b in TeX to denote 'a raised to the
> b<sup>th</sup> power'.</p>"
I don't think anyone is suggesting that because it obviously would
break existing pages, instead we'd have to do something like <p>this is
some text with an equation <tx>x = 2y</tx></p>
Trev
>
> - Reece
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