Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
I think you make a compelling case for adding math to HTML the simple way. Personally, I'm open to adding it to HTML5. How much would it add to the specification?
I remain sceptical about this. However, if there is a serious effort to replace MathML I believe the resulting language must fulfil the following requirements:
1) Easy conversion from standard LaTeX2e. This probably means that the grammar should follow LaTeX as closely as possible. ISO standards that no-one uses are irrelevant in practice; LaTeX matters.
2) Excellent typography. Faking radical signs and so on is simply unacceptable. Mathematics is painful enough to read as it is without poor presentation making the reader's eyes bleed. A significant effort is needed to get as close as possible to TeX in this regard.
3) The provision of alternative fallback content should be easy. For accessibility reasons it should be possible to provide the LaTeX source and/or a textual description of the equation. It should also be possible to provide an image to display instead of the rendered equation. Indeed, it would be extremely beneficial if there were some way to make the current generation of browsers render the image and ignore the mathematical content which, given the enhancements to CSS likely to be needed to fulfil point 2, is likely to render extremely poorly in current generation browsers.
-- "You see stars that clear have been dead for years But the idea just lives on..." -- Bright Eyes
