I think the nearly 25 year effort spent on MathML should have been put towards standardizing browser engines natively rendering LaTeX à la MathJax. The initial vision of MathML was that people would write it in a WYSIWYG editor (since it’s far too verbose to write by hand), but that grossly misjudged users’ preferences—LaTeX is the lingua franca of mathematical typesetting, and people much prefer writing (and reading) LaTeX. Realizing this over a decade(!) after MathML was first introduced in 1998, the MathML community has since focused some of their efforts on LaTeX conversion, which raises the question: why not just focus on rendering LaTeX directly, rather than translating it to (and maintaining standards for) a clunky intermediary format no human will ever directly read or write?
Just tried <a href="https://fred-wang.github.io/MathFonts/mozilla_mathml_test/" rel="nofollow">https://fred-wang.github.io/MathFonts/mozilla_mathml_test/</a> in Canary with enable-experimental-web-platform-features. As they say, the stretchy characters (e.g. think \left, \middle, \right in LaTeX) all have wrong heights at the moment. Still, that's a lot of progress made.<p>Edit: Actually, when I select any font other than "Default fonts (local only)", the stretchy characters' heights change in response to content they embrace (though still not correct -- they tend to be taller than they should be), unlike with "Default fonts (local only)" where the characters won't stretch at all. I wonder why this is the case.
> As promised, after a short break, we have also renewed our work on upstreaming MathML-Core in Chromium. […] You can try these for yourself in Chrome canary by enabling experimental web platform features.<p>Finally! The lack of MathML support in Chromium based browsers was quite frustrating to me. Though, it will be probably still quite a lot of time before the libraries like MathJax and KaTeX became redundant for basic use cases.
As far as I'm concerned, this is <i>great</i> news. Of course I get the criticisms from the "MathML sucks" and "why not use TeX" crowd. And that's fine... I'm not even sure I disagree with those folks. But the big difference, to me, is that MathML-in-the-browser is here (more or less) <i>today</i> and is just shy of being ubiquitous and widely usable by most browser users. That is, IMO, a big deal.<p>And the people who really, really, want something other than MathML are free to start (or finish?) writing code, raising money to have other people write code, etc., and work with Google, Mozilla, et al, and get their system integrated into browsers. I'd just be surprised if this effort yields any meaningful results in less than 20 years.<p>So at least now we'll have native MathML rendering to tide us over until the New Math Browser Thing becomes reality.
MathML, like other XML syntax languages, are more meant for computers to read & interpret - not for end users to write. I hope it becomes native across all browsers (as its the best chance of standardisation we currently have), as good as MathJax is, we shouldn't be having to rely on a JS polyfill to render maths in a browser...
Chrome removed MathML long time ago and I thought that was the end of the story. But apparently Igalia folks didn't give up. I really appreciate and respect this level of persistence, and I'd give a bit of credit to Chrome folks as they don't at least reject their new initiative.<p>I'm wondering who is sponsoring this work. Igalia is still a company and I don't think they are afford to do this as a hobby... But maybe they do this anyway?
The Chromium ticket is <a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606</a><p>You can try it with chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features enabled here <a href="https://fred-wang.github.io/MathFonts/mozilla_mathml_test/" rel="nofollow">https://fred-wang.github.io/MathFonts/mozilla_mathml_test/</a>
A lot of people don't seem to get the point of MathML. Well, suppose you have a blog, and you want to use math. If it's going to be consumed on the web, a javascript library probably works OK. But if people subscribe over RSS/atom? Or over email? As far as I can tell, nothing works. Your best bet is to try to figure out how to write your math using unicode, or (the horror) to render everything to bitmaped images.<p>Hopefully MathML will help with that. The most important thing is that MathML is limited enough in power that gmail et al. can support it without worrying about security / privacy. (Unlike, say, .svg images now.)
I've played with MathML <a href="http://gron.ca/algebra/027.html" rel="nofollow">http://gron.ca/algebra/027.html</a> it's okish but LaTeX is better.<p>A way of displaying math is needed on browsers. So is a better way of citation, and how about a video standard.<p>Are we at an inflection point? Traditional math symbols will just be replaced by a computer language like Python? And we end up with 2 languages for doing math; the old paper way and the news computer programming language way?