One important aspect the work Igalia/Fred/etc did here was defining how MathML should render in browsers. Previously was this undefined[1], and working through all the integration points with CSS/HTML in the new MathML Core spec[2].<p>The next largest part was writing all the tests for this work, e.g. making sure that margin/border/padding worked consistently between all the MathML elements[3].<p>Arguably the implementation in Chromium was the "smallest" part of the work required here.<p>Congrats to Fred/Igalia/MathML-CG and all those involved. :)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter2.html#fund.renderingmodel" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter2.html#fund.renderingmo...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core</a>
[3] <a href="https://wpt.fyi/results/mathml/relations/css-styling/padding-border-margin" rel="nofollow">https://wpt.fyi/results/mathml/relations/css-styling/padding...</a>
MathML's removal in 2013 in Chrome was a huge deal in the accessibility community. Fixing the bugs and vulnerabilities of MathML in blink would have been entirely possible with Google's resources. In hindsight, it's easy to see why—now we consider Google an ad company first—but back then it was truly bewildering, given that Firefox continued their support of MathML.<p>There was a big push at the time for native presentational MathML, and Chrome basically undercut it completely. MathJax picked up some of the slack, but it was never a true replacement. Either way, it's nice see presentational MathML is back.
I'm a big believer of treating mathematical notation as a first-class citizen on the web. This won't make me jump ship to a Chromium-based browser, but I'm glad to see it happen.
I implemented MathML as web components a few years ago as a work around. It wasn't super hard, but a native implementation provides so much better accessibility (and, likely, perf) <a href="https://github.com/pshihn/math-ml">https://github.com/pshihn/math-ml</a>
MathML always seemed like a waste of time. It was/is objectively worse on every axis (at least from a user perspective) compared to the long-established LaTeX notation.
Congratulations to the igalia team here for amazing work. I’ve been waiting to use MathML natively for years and thanks to a lot of hard work this is finally possible.
I like it.<p>Here you can have a look at the syntax as well as the corresponding results: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core/</a><p>Maybe a LaTeX to MathML converter would be decent.
jsMath, now MathJax, took all the wind out of MathML’s sails by rendering LaTeX equations in the client. I know that MathML is better in some ways, but the combination of downloading custom fonts and JavaScript-based layout solved the problem well enough.
I'm in for MathML, but could it be just a loadable JavaScript component instead? Considering the usage frequency of MathML, a built-in browser implementation looks kind of wasteful.
> “This is the first example I know of that a major, major feature is really coming to the Web despite there not really being a business case for the business that normally advance the Web,” said Rick Byers of the Chrome team at Google.<p>Paraphrased: It doesn't make money, so why do it?
The history of that ticket is really mind-blowing <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>