Re: Mozilla mathml project to be interred

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Robert O'Callahan<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Mozilla staff are currently maintaining our MathML support (i.e., keeping it
> working as other things change around it) and willing to review and land
> contributions to improve it, but we aren't going to invest in any major
> improvements until MathML becomes a lot more popular on the Web. We already
> support a very large subset of MathML and there's just no point in extending
> that until people start using what we've already implemented.

That seems somewhat circular in that until there is a high quality
implementation
people won't use it.  Using MathML is currently quite the "magic incantation"
that also requires a user to install fonts.  Most users won't do that.

> Actually there is one major improvement for MathML coming as a side effect
> when we transition to the new HTML5-spec-based parser; you will be able to
> write MathML in non-XML HTML documents. That will make MathML far more
> usable on the Web.

Yes, that will certainly be a big help with the deployment of MathML by
authors.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics