MathML is a failed web standard

Post by koolba » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 11:01 AM UTC

spicyj wrote: post #23

bentley wrote: post #22

It’s instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Here’s the quadratic formula: In troff, x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a In TeX, x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a} In plain Unicode, 𝑥 = (−𝑏 ± √(𝑏² − 4𝑎𝑐))⁄2𝑎 In MathML, x = − b ± b 2 − 4ac 2a MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time it’s only ever used as an interchange format, automatically…

Yeah. I think that's inevitable with an XML syntax. XML is good at some things, but representing math expressions clearly is not one of them.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 11:20 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #36

elcapitan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! Is to run that giant heap of probably not sandboxed or security-audited code in every client actually a thing I would want to have? I mean people are paranoid about js doing unwanted things, but a large distribution of tex code running inside the browser, really?

You can already render LaTeX equations with javascript. It would be madness to include everything but a safe subset of commands that are commonly used to render maths would be fine.

Post by avian » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 11:40 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #21

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #3

Blargh. It annoys me that MathML was even a thing. We've already had a perfectly-fine and widely-used markup language for mathematical formulae; it's called TeX. Ideally, I'd prefer that HTML5 include a tag, or something similar, that takes TeX as input and produces formatted output. A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! At least MathJax can take TeX as…

> A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! TeX doesn't have dynamic reflow, is defined by a macro system that involves essentially monkey patching the parser as it goes, lacks anything resembling a DOM, wasn't designed with Unicode or internationalization in mind, is completely unparallelizable, doesn't interoperate with CSS, has its own concept of block a…

Post by hansen » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

avian wrote: post #55

pcwalton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! TeX doesn't have dynamic reflow, is defined by a macro system that involves essentially monkey patching the parser as it goes, lacks anything resembling a DOM, wasn't designed with Unicode or internationalization in mind, is completely unparallelizable, doesn't interoperate with CSS, has its own concept of block a…

Considering amount of expertise that went into making TeX and the fact that (in my experience at least) it far surpasses other solutions, it might simply be that mathematical notation typesetting doesn't lend itself to dynamic reflow, internationalization, parallelization, DOM representation, interoperability with CSS and its concept of blocks and inline layouts, wrapping around floats, single pass processing and int…

Post by WhitneyLand » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 11:59 AM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #42

I am not sure if the verbosity of XML brings anything to the table here. Why not just implement a TeX based extension?