Igalia will restart their (Chrome) MathML work in Q2 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Igalia will restart their (Chrome) MathML work in Q2 2021

mathml.igalia.com

42 pointsmindcrime14 comments

I cannot upvote this enough. It is a hugely crucial project to get MathML on Chrome.

I don’t think W3C gets enough love, the standards for CSS and HTML have provided one of the most awesome foundations for information delivery. Corporations are trying to take away open web from us, but like the FOSS movement, I’m super proud that humanity has at least until now had an open web, and that partly is due to the great work of W3C standardizing web languages.

Chrome really dropped the ball on MathML - yes MathJax is amazing (side note: I just released my own rich text web editor that is powered by MathJax - https://writer.math.dev), but we all know that MathML is a key chance to have a standardized form of recording digital math. I am very specific in saying recording and not inputting as MathML is not suitable for human input in most cases, but as a XML like markup, it is great for recording digitally. AsciiMath to me is the best way to input math.

I would love to support this project, but I wasn’t able to find a smaller donation amount section (let me know).

I really hope the team are able to get Chrome to adopt MathML.

MathML support was removed eight years ago from Chrome, actually. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430...

Thanks - yes, I know; but good to see the original source of the discussion vs reading from blogs etc.

Math is used so widely in the sciences, I’m very disappointed that Google didn’t put some resources to get MathML working in Chrome. It has really hampered online math publishing :( MathJax is great, but it’s slow and not a native to the browser.

> I’m super proud that humanity has at least until now had an open web, and that partly is due to the great work of W3C standardizing web languages.

W3C undoubtedly had a role, but i think this is a bit of a revionist history to say that w3c is what got us the open web.

I don't believe that MathML should be integrated in a browser: MathML does not requires a lot of CPU, so you can get away with JS+canvas that implements the MathML spec.

By having it in the browser you are making the browser more bloated (more disk space, more memory, more cache misses) and possibly less stable/secure, even-though less than 1% of the people are going to use this feature. Other issues include increasing the barrier of entry for new browsers, having to deal with differences in implementation of MathML when using it, and making the spec harder to improve.

There’s so much bloat in Browsers already though. And millions of school children study math, so there’s a big market for online mathematics.

I agree with you that the solution needs to be a good one, you don’t want a standard that is difficult to implement across browsers or is inefficient / bad. I’m no expert so I can’t comment on MathML, but I am just hopeful that some standardized math format can be agreed on; and web standards have the best chance for this —- hence its important for Chrome to implement what is a W3C standard. My opinion anyway.

This opinion is completely ignoring accessibility. A canvas is a black box to non-sighted users.

Totally agree – KaTeX is good enough. Browser implementors should spend their time on other things.

Browser implementors have been spending their time on other things. People have been asking for chrome support for almost a decade now. I believe MathML support in Firefox is entirely due to volunteers. And as you see from this post Chrome support is being implemented by Igalia, not the Chromium core developers.

This is an argument against any and all changes.

No.

I'm in favor of features that enable new uses cases, either by providing a new API (e.g. WebBluetooth) or by massively increasing performance (e.g. WebGL, WebAssembly).

Features that can be built on top of those foundations should not be shipped in browsers for the reasons that I mentioned before.

Yes, but why? I would say 99% of users don't look at math in the browser in their daily life. MathJax is doing a fantastic job here.

The biggest benefit of using things like MathJax: Predictable and similar results in all browsers. Just think about fonts and spacing for example.

MathML rendering support is and was broken when looking at all browser vendors.

What needs more browser support in all browsers are other things like JPEG XL.

I think once the standard is fully implemented across browsers authors will be able to define a font-family and the results should be visually similar in all browsers. I think this is preferable to authors in case they want a specific font family that matches the overall design.

As an example take a look at my doc page for MathUp[1] in firefox (which supports MathML natively). I am able to use Libertinus as my main font family and compliment it beautifully with Libertinus Mono for code samples and Libertinus Math for the math samples.

1: https://runarberg.github.io/mathup/

MathJax should be implemented directly within Browsers vs a slow JS package.

However to answer your question, I separate MathML from MathJax. MathML is a data model for math, MathJax is a renderer - both should co exist and complement each other. Most other vendors are supporting MathML, Chrome by not supporting it, has pushed it away from being a standard.

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