Re: Mozilla mathml project to be interred

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 1:41 AM, Martin Holz<[email protected]> wrote:
> Alex Milowski <[email protected]> writes:
>
> It's not the quality of the Mozilla implementation, that stops publishers from
> using MathML. But you have to offer an other representation of math, for example
> images,for those people, who use other browser. Then, if the other
> representation works well im Mozilla too, why would you maintain two
> representations?

It is great to have some kind of implementation of MathML and I am certain
quite happy that Firefox contains some support for MathML.  Unfortunately, that
support is incomplete and still requires addition fonts on most deployed
platforms.  The coming STIX fonts will help alleviate the font problem but
it is unclear how Mozilla will achieve uniformity given OS vendors release
cycle and commitment to including the STIX fonts.  Most certainly, people
with older OS version (of which there are many) will not have them.

Having to use CSS and have the browser download a font isn't very friendly
to a publisher and most will attribute that to quality of
implementation--however
fair or unfair that is.

That's where I come back to active support by Mozilla of the "big three" of
MathML, SVG, and HTML.  Just maintaining the code isn't sufficient.

-- 
--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