Re: Ideas for future improvements

Frédéric WANG <[email protected]> writes:

> * <mfenced> should be deprecated as it duplicates its equivalent
> <mrow>+<mo> expansion and thus adds more code to implementation. For
> native implementation like WebKit/Gecko this typically means creating
> many anonymous frames (for separators and open/close). This is a mess to
> make the mfenced rendering 100% equivalent to the <mrow>+<mo> expansion,
> to handle edge cases when parsing the attributes or to manage memory
> allocation/desallocation after dynamic changes. It seems that the only
> reason for this element is that it is a convenient shorthand for
> rudimentary implementations that don't know about the operator
> dictionary or have bad mo support in general (in some a11y tools or in
> Opera Presto).

I think <mfenced> should be kept without deprecation.  I
know that the spec makes it no different from
<mrow>+<mo> for native rendering.  But (1) the markup is
actually richer with it, (2) it is convenient in the way
that you observe [consistent with the what-wg sense of
convenience], and (3) it's an additional hook for CSS, that
is helpful.  Also deprecation usually precedes removal, and
removal would break old documents.

                                    -- Bill