[whatwg] Mathematics in HTML5

[White Lynx]

Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

> border-character isn't going to work. When scaled non-proportionally,  
> characters get ugly, with horizontal elements getting thick. The { and }  
> characters will suffer the most from this. TeX applies custom logic to  
> stretchy braces, and I think we shouldn't try to make ANY character  
> stretch automatically.

Agree. SVG inserted using generate content or maybe image borders would
work better. Something can be achived with ordinary borders and border radius too.


> This isn't going to work correctly when the subscripts and superscripts  
> are complex (e.g. fractions). In your proposal, they'll fail to stack and  
> will go one after another. What should happen is that they should still be  
> one above another, just occupying more vertical space.

Correct positioning of indices is a little bit tricky. I am not against CSS
extensions, but I think that on first stage markup should not rely on CSS extesions
as it is unclear if and when they will be introduced and implemented. So today
CSS extensions will no help much. Look at XHTML Ruby module, it has CSS3 counter part
but if you want to render Ruby in browsers you have to use different markup with CSS2.1
rather then existing Ruby markup with CSS3. On the other hand to control all aspects 
of Ruby formatting in a simple convenient way CSS3 Ruby module makes more sense then CSS2.1.
No doubt it was possible to introduce Ruby markup that would basically work with CSS2.1
and for quality formatting would require some CSS3, however it was not done. 
Result is no Ruby on web (Once we wrote UserJS for Ruby and tried to test how it works 
on real web. We found only one page with Ruby and even that page was served as text/html
where Ruby is not allowed by specs). Thus CSS3 extensions are useful, but they are useful 
in long term perspective only while for short term we have to ensure compatibility 
with what we will actually have in near future (~ CSS2.1), without ensuring this CSS3 
extensions are unlikely to be implemented (why to implement them if there is no markup
that would benefit from CSS3 math module).



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