[whatwg] Mathematics on HTML5

[Martin Atkins]

[originally sent privately by mistake; sorry Ian.]

Ian Hickson wrote:

 > On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Mihai Sucan wrote:
 >
 >> Yes, it's true authors don't generally jump on whatever comes new 
(that's the reason MathML is not as widely used as LaTeX).
 >
 >
 >
 > I would say MathML is not widely used because MathML doesn't work in 
HTML, personally. If we made MathML work in HTML, possibly with rules 
that make the syntax easier (by implying tags as I suggested earlier), 
then that might well change, especially given that one UA already has 
extensive and high-quality support for MathML.
 >

It seems to me that a good path would be to fix up CSS's shortcomings 
(which have been discussed at length in this thread) so that it is 
possible to specify math rendering with CSS.

Then MathML only have to be implemented once as a CSS stylesheet and 
then that stylesheet could be shipped with all browsers or even just 
served alongside the content so it'd work for everyone. (browser 
incompatibilities notwithstanding)

As a bonus, the fixes to CSS would probably end up being useful in a lot 
of other scenarios too.

I agree that it'd be worthwhile to do tag implication though, which 
admittedly is not an option if MathML support is just a stylesheet.