On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoi...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 2013/5/5 Robert O'Callahan <rob...@ocallahan.org>> One other thing: EPUB > publishers are screaming for good math support for > > textbooks (and currently that means they want MathML). They're mostly > > Webkit-based, and maybe we don't care about them, but there you are. > > > > Given that TeX is already the standard in scientific publishing, I would > find it very surprising if they complained about a TeX-based or TeX-like > format ! > > TeX is a programming language and, in practice, running the program results in a rigid PDF. For the Web, we need something that can dynamically reflow to different viewports and integrate with CSS layout. MathJax or Web Components involve the publisher sending a program along with a supposedly declarative representation, so as a whole, it's again like sending a program, because you have to run the program to be sure about what the declarative input really results. EPUB publishers want something that is declarative and reflows to viewport width. Presentation MathML is that and it doesn't make sense to start over. These days, it's fashionable to rely on JavaScript and to treat downloadable EPUB files as an anachronism in an always-online world, but there's still value in being able to represent content in a way that can be reflown, edited, copied and pasted instead of only being rendered by a program supplied by the publisher. After all, we have all this CSS stuff for non-mathematical text instead of each site sending over an emscripten-compiled typesetter that paints the image of text onto canvas. Although math doesn't have the same mass-market appeal as text in general, math is pretty important for humanity, so I think it makes sense to keep the way to handle mathematical text in a way that's analogous with other text in browsers (declarative, reflowable, has a DOM) and endeavor to get Wikipedia to actually use it by default so that Chrome and IE would have compatibility pressure from a ridiculously mainstream site even if not from its most mainstream articles. (Compared to music and flowcharts, math has a greater need to integrate with line layout instead of working as an image-like region, so it makes less sense to use SVG. As for chemistry, presentation MathML probably serves chemistry pretty well, too.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
