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I don't know how many of the people lamenting MathML ever came to exist are active math-on-the-web developers. I for one am dealing with third-party math equati

by dginev 11y ago

I don't know how many of the people lamenting MathML ever came to exist are active math-on-the-web developers. I for one am dealing with third-party math equations on a daily basis and can only dream of the wonder of ubiquitous MathML support in all major browsers. The details as to why are here: http://prodg.org/blog/mathml_please/2015-09-16/MathML%20on%20the%20Web%20%E2%80%93%20Please http://prodg.org/blog/mathml_please/2015-09-16/MathML%20on%2...! As things stand, math handling on the web is inconvenient at best and a nightmare at worst. Some quick points about the comments here: - MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it's meant for the browser/machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don't read/write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML. - Calling MathML a "failed web standard" is fine by me, as long as you continue the remark with "the Chrome and IE browsers have failed mathematicians" and "the math-on-the-web developers have failed as a community".

analyst74 11y ago
I am with you. Some people write their math by hand in LaTeX or other formats, but many use visual tools and draw math similar to drawing diagrams. Then those tools generate whatever source code necessary. In those scenarios, MathML would be much easier to deal with than most other formats. Also, Presentation MathML support is much easier to implement than full-scale support of LaTeX or other more complete math solutions including Content MathML.
- thanatropism 11y ago
  > Some people write their math by hand in LaTeX or other formats, but many use visual tools and draw math similar to drawing diagrams. Which people? Everyone I know who uses equations in MS Word abandoned the clicky tools as soon as the pseudolatex entry language became available.
  - pflats 11y ago
    >Which people? Currently, high schools students taking the PARCC, SmarterBalanced, and other web-based standardized tests. And whoa man is it terrible to watch them struggle with it.
- Retra 11y ago
  And "many people" write code by dragging squares around in a GUI and entering equations into spreadsheets, but that method is completely unacceptable to a professional. The only people who write math in a drawing program are people who don't do enough math to be bothered to learn it.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
Do you think other kinds of content should be included in the web spec too? So, special tags for musical notation, special tags for all forms of maps and geographic, geological features, tags to represent chemical structures, tags for all major forms of engineering notation, etc? To me, it's not that I don't think there is a use case for MathML, it's that it's too content-specific to make sense at the browser level. The only way it makes sense in my head is if I think of math as a language that browsers should support on the basis of internationalization. That makes some sense to me, but if that's the idea then OP is right they should use standard notation (as we do for every other language) and not XML, and it shouldn't be styleable by CSS at all.
- ga6840 11y ago
  Agree, we do not include a 4*4 image in HTML by inserting <img><row><col><pixel r="255" b="0" g="128" a="0"> ...... In browser level, I think we should treat math expression as a simple and atom component, and the only benefits to expose DOM/XML/JSON or whatever structural information in webpage is probably you can manipulate/extract info from it (e.g. using Javascript). Do we really need to manipulate a math expression? I think a simple "<math>\frac a b</math>" makes much sense to me. I think it is about the trade-off on HTML granularity.
  - dginev 11y ago
    "Do we really need to manipulate a math expression?" If you don't, please don't say no one does. Having a math DOM allows for actual interactivity with mathematics, from highlighting, copying subtrees, embedding links, having on the fly computations/simplifications, etc. Not to mention add-on services like math indexing and search. Yes, we need to manipulate and machine-read math expressions, if we want to finally take online math workflows to the 21st century.
    - ga6840 11y ago
      What I mean is "really need". In fact, there is also the possibility we want to highlight a portion of an image, copy a subimage, etc, but did our HTML <img> tag designed like the way I mentioned? I am the author of a math search engine OPMES (tkhost.github.io/opmes), the search engine works pretty well without the knowledge of DOM structure of math expression. Actually MathML makes a lot inconvenient during OPMES development, to a degree that I choose not to support it. BTW, if we want a <math> tag that no one will write by hand and only machine will try to understand, then think about why not HTML being designed as some open binary format in the first place?
legulere 11y ago
- MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it's meant for the browser/machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don't read/write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML. Sadly that's not true for SVG. SVG has many parts that are only there to make writing/editing SVGs by hand easier. Circle, rectangle elements, the commas in the path strings (which follow relatively insane rules. Almost all implementations already had bugs in the correct parsing behaviour regarding commas/whitespace)
magicalist 11y ago
All you've really written here is that you want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, but then you jump to happily taking MathML because it already exists in some places. None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web. The author here is saying we want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, so let's make a sane spec that works with the way the web works, not as if it's in an embedded foreign object viewer. SVG is actually a great parallel In many instances it is easy to write by hand, until you go to any level of moderate complexity and hit the brick wall of SVG's usability. And that's when you wish it had a sane design, because there are a few aspects that are quite close.
- dginev 11y ago
  "None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web." I can't but see these as secondary to why MathML isn't supported yet. The current state works already well enough in Firefox, but no one would use it, since why support a single browser? And we've had it working nicely in Chrome before the devs pulled the plug because of lack of manpower. You could try to overrule the cruft from say the upcoming HTML5.1 spec, and find a good alignment with CSS. If it proves annoying or impossible, you could take the process further towards a MathML 4 that offers a CSS-compatible subset, etc. And the W3C Math group could approve of an experimental note much quicker, so that we don't sit around for years waiting for the standardization process. The web mathematics community is a small one, and most of us have strong opinions on MathML. The way this debate is heading will tear the community in various tinier subfractions and likely continue the "math-on-the web winter" for another decade. In my eyes, nothing has changed really - we've had browsers silently complicit in ignoring MathML, and a community tiny enough to not be able to move them in any direction. The two important bits for a math-on-the-web developer to have sanity are 1) expose the mathematics content of a page as data (the way we do tables) and 2) do so in a standard cross-browser way. Anything else leads to insane hacks, and tools such as math search engines, clipboards etc. can not be implemented directly.
ska 11y ago
MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it's meant for the browser/machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don't read/write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML. That's true, but the problem is that MathML is fairly useless without a robust set of tools to manipulate it and some way to do efficient manipulation by hand. These tools didn't develop in any meaningful way and so people haven't adopted it. MathML by itself is only half an answer without a way to easily convert a more human friendly format bidirectionally without loss of detail.

by dginev 11y ago

analyst74 11y ago

I am with you. Some people write their math by hand in LaTeX or other formats, but many use visual tools and draw math similar to drawing diagrams. Then those tools generate whatever source code necessary. In those scenarios, MathML would be much easier to deal with than most other formats. Also, Presentation MathML support is much easier to implement than full-scale support of LaTeX or other more complete math solutions including Content MathML.

thanatropism 11y ago
> Some people write their math by hand in LaTeX or other formats, but many use visual tools and draw math similar to drawing diagrams. Which people? Everyone I know who uses equations in MS Word abandoned the clicky tools as soon as the pseudolatex entry language became available.
- pflats 11y ago
  >Which people? Currently, high schools students taking the PARCC, SmarterBalanced, and other web-based standardized tests. And whoa man is it terrible to watch them struggle with it.
Retra 11y ago
And "many people" write code by dragging squares around in a GUI and entering equations into spreadsheets, but that method is completely unacceptable to a professional. The only people who write math in a drawing program are people who don't do enough math to be bothered to learn it.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

Do you think other kinds of content should be included in the web spec too? So, special tags for musical notation, special tags for all forms of maps and geographic, geological features, tags to represent chemical structures, tags for all major forms of engineering notation, etc? To me, it's not that I don't think there is a use case for MathML, it's that it's too content-specific to make sense at the browser level. The only way it makes sense in my head is if I think of math as a language that browsers should support on the basis of internationalization. That makes some sense to me, but if that's the idea then OP is right they should use standard notation (as we do for every other language) and not XML, and it shouldn't be styleable by CSS at all.

ga6840 11y ago
Agree, we do not include a 4*4 image in HTML by inserting <img><row><col><pixel r="255" b="0" g="128" a="0"> ...... In browser level, I think we should treat math expression as a simple and atom component, and the only benefits to expose DOM/XML/JSON or whatever structural information in webpage is probably you can manipulate/extract info from it (e.g. using Javascript). Do we really need to manipulate a math expression? I think a simple "<math>\frac a b</math>" makes much sense to me. I think it is about the trade-off on HTML granularity.
- dginev 11y ago
  "Do we really need to manipulate a math expression?" If you don't, please don't say no one does. Having a math DOM allows for actual interactivity with mathematics, from highlighting, copying subtrees, embedding links, having on the fly computations/simplifications, etc. Not to mention add-on services like math indexing and search. Yes, we need to manipulate and machine-read math expressions, if we want to finally take online math workflows to the 21st century.
  - ga6840 11y ago
    What I mean is "really need". In fact, there is also the possibility we want to highlight a portion of an image, copy a subimage, etc, but did our HTML <img> tag designed like the way I mentioned? I am the author of a math search engine OPMES (tkhost.github.io/opmes), the search engine works pretty well without the knowledge of DOM structure of math expression. Actually MathML makes a lot inconvenient during OPMES development, to a degree that I choose not to support it. BTW, if we want a <math> tag that no one will write by hand and only machine will try to understand, then think about why not HTML being designed as some open binary format in the first place?

legulere 11y ago

- MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it's meant for the browser/machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don't read/write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML. Sadly that's not true for SVG. SVG has many parts that are only there to make writing/editing SVGs by hand easier. Circle, rectangle elements, the commas in the path strings (which follow relatively insane rules. Almost all implementations already had bugs in the correct parsing behaviour regarding commas/whitespace)

magicalist 11y ago

All you've really written here is that you want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, but then you jump to happily taking MathML because it already exists in some places. None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web. The author here is saying we want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, so let's make a sane spec that works with the way the web works, not as if it's in an embedded foreign object viewer. SVG is actually a great parallel In many instances it is easy to write by hand, until you go to any level of moderate complexity and hit the brick wall of SVG's usability. And that's when you wish it had a sane design, because there are a few aspects that are quite close.

dginev 11y ago
"None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web." I can't but see these as secondary to why MathML isn't supported yet. The current state works already well enough in Firefox, but no one would use it, since why support a single browser? And we've had it working nicely in Chrome before the devs pulled the plug because of lack of manpower. You could try to overrule the cruft from say the upcoming HTML5.1 spec, and find a good alignment with CSS. If it proves annoying or impossible, you could take the process further towards a MathML 4 that offers a CSS-compatible subset, etc. And the W3C Math group could approve of an experimental note much quicker, so that we don't sit around for years waiting for the standardization process. The web mathematics community is a small one, and most of us have strong opinions on MathML. The way this debate is heading will tear the community in various tinier subfractions and likely continue the "math-on-the web winter" for another decade. In my eyes, nothing has changed really - we've had browsers silently complicit in ignoring MathML, and a community tiny enough to not be able to move them in any direction. The two important bits for a math-on-the-web developer to have sanity are 1) expose the mathematics content of a page as data (the way we do tables) and 2) do so in a standard cross-browser way. Anything else leads to insane hacks, and tools such as math search engines, clipboards etc. can not be implemented directly.

ska 11y ago

MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it's meant for the browser/machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don't read/write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML. That's true, but the problem is that MathML is fairly useless without a robust set of tools to manipulate it and some way to do efficient manipulation by hand. These tools didn't develop in any meaningful way and so people haven't adopted it. MathML by itself is only half an answer without a way to easily convert a more human friendly format bidirectionally without loss of detail.