On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 5:22 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoi...@gmail.com> wrote: > There really are two basic reasons to support MathML in the browser that > have been given in this thread: > 1. It's needed to allow specifying CSS style for each individual piece of > an equation. (It's also been claimed to be needed for WYSIWYG editing, but > I don't believe that part, as again, having a syntax tree is not a special > property of XML). > 2. It's needed to support epub3 natively in browsers. I don't have much to > answer to that as the whole epub thing was news to me: I thought that we > were only concerned with doing a Web rendering engine, it turned out that > Gecko is rather a Web *and epub* rendering engine. If I understand > correctly, the only reason to give epub this special treatment whereas we > happily implement our PDF viewer in JavaScript only, is that epub happens > to be XHTML. That sounds like XHTML is a sort of trojan horse to introduce > native support for all sorts of XML languages (like, here, MathML) into > Gecko, but whatever --- I've had enough fighting.
I don't know that there's consensus that we need to support epub3 natively in browsers. At least not any more than there is a need to support pdf natively. I.e. I'm happy with having JS transform content from epub3 to HTML+CSS+SVG. That said, I'd like to add 3. Support for mixing math and other content, like SVG/HTML/images. This is something that we ran into with SVG right away, that it integrates really poorly with HTML. We're now going through all sorts of pain to make the two work more nicely together. It's getting better, but it's still a pretty sorry state. 4. Support for WYSIWYG editing. Be it through CSS or not. I think using markup and producing a DOM is the easiest way to accomplish 1, 3 and 4. But there might definitely be other solutions too. And I definitely do understand the argument that maybe we are optimizing for the wrong things. While 1, 3 and 4 are in my mind important use cases, I think they are much more rare than wanting to display a simple static equation. It would be cool to find a solution that makes the simple things simpler than MathML, while keeping the complicated things possible. I think the same can be said for vector graphics and SVG FWIW. Before diving in to SVG we did debate trying to find a better solution. But no one was able to come up with anything and so here we are. / Jonas _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
