Beyond Browsers: Moving forward, together
and MathML

https://bkardell.com/blog/Beyond.html

https://mathml.igalia.com/faq/

A lot of things aren't stuck over politics or even substantial technical issues...

Hundreds of W3C Member Orgs

A few vendors

2004

From Proprietary to Open

2017: CSS Grid
remember that?

Origins back to 1996
Lots of tries...

And then suddenly, there it is...

How?

Open.

The Web Platform is a commons.

All of the standards implementations are now open

We love the commons,

and we can help.

•  V8, JavaScriptCore, SpiderMonkey
• Chromium, Gecko/Servo, Webkit

We are trusted committers everywhere

ResizeObserver

Responsive image preloading

Web Packaging

We are just scratching the surface

MathML in Chromium!

It's the right thing to do.

What is MathML?

MathML is the web standard for markup about mathematical content.

Just as HTML's <table> element provides a standard for expressing and working with text containing tabular relationships, <math> does this for text containing mathematical expressions.

Math is hard.

And it's text.

Standard

Long history, W3C/ISO/IEC --

added to the HTML Specification in 2004.

A rich ecosystem of tools

Creating and editing content (GUI)

• MathType
• Microsoft Windows Math Input Panel (handwriting recognition)
• Microsoft Equation Editor
• OpenOffice.org Math editor
• WIRIS editor

Creating and editing content (Handwriting and OCR)

• InftyReader
• MyScript (handwriting recognition)
• WIRIS hand (handwriting recognition)

Computation

• CalcMe (formerly WIRIS calc) 
• MathWorks
• MuPAD Maxima Sage Wolfram
• Mathematica

Converting content to/from MathML

• HeVeA 
• mathematical 
• laTeXML 
• latex2mathml 
• mathconverter 
• TeXZilla 
• Mathoid 
• SnuggleTex 
• ASCIIMath 
• GNU TeXMmacs 

Efforts like arXMLiv also study the use of Math on the web and its tooling.

There is a lot of math out there

• Many aren't public, buy millions of docs reported
• Wikipedia alone has over half a million <math> elements
• In the HTTPArchive August dataset of public homepages it is more popular than a bunch of other standard elements

Which browsers support MathML?

At the present time, only Chromium-based browsers (such as Chrome and Edge) do not support MathML rendering.

Igalia is actively working on the development of this support.

Successful completion of this work means landing support in all remaining browsers and browser-based renderers.

How does the lack of MathML support in Chrome impact me?

Tradeoffs and complexity whack-a-mole.

There are many costs.  Imagine if one browser didn't support <table>.

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