[whatwg] Mathematics on HTML5
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
Mon May 29 06:49:50 PDT 2006
Maybe I can add my view to this thread. I'm no user of MathML, nor do
I write often complicated equations on the web. I don't know much
Latex either.
One thing I know however is that the next time I'll have to put an
equation on a web page, I won't go looking for a MathML editor just
to be able to generate the markup, convert the page to XHTML served
as application/xhtml+xml (so that it works with MathML) and ask my
users to install the required plugin or web browser just to see my
equation. I'll use an image: it'll be a lot simpler.
What Juan propose, about adding a limited number of elements to HTML
for maths, actually makes sense to me, especially if you can get not-
too-bad results with CSS. HTML is designed to be easy to learn and
write; if we had a markup like that for mathematics which integrates
easily in HTML it'd be much more used than MathML, I'm sure.
But I think it would be better to develop that as a microformat[1]
first, then, once it works and is well defined, see if the WhatWG is
interested in integrating the microformat into HTML5 by giving it
specific elements and attributes.
[1]: http://microformats.org/
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/
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