[webkit-dev] Proposal: Remove ENABLE(MATHML)

[Maciej Stachowiak]

> On Oct 25, 2017, at 1:44 AM, Frédéric WANG <fred.wang at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> On 24/10/2017 18:50, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should support disabling
>> MathML. My point is just that if we support disabling it, it should be
>> a runtime switch, not compile-time.
>> Good reasons to have a compile-time switch would be:
>> - Some ports want the code size savings
>> - It requires back-end code that is not available on all ports
>> 
>> But neither of those is true.
>> 
>> On the other hand, we might still want a runtime switch if some ports would like to disable the feature for reason of compatibility based on available fonts. I think it's up to port owners to say whether they want to disable the feature for this reason.
> Hi,
> 
> I believe it is up to the platform owners to decide whether they want to
> provide math fonts by default ; depending on whether they want to
> privilege disk space or a better user experience.
> 
> However, I still don't see the connection between available fonts and
> enabling MathML support. As I said, some pages with MathML provide the
> necessary WOFF math fonts while others just use basic math (fractions
> etc) where the default text fonts are enough. So the owners would be
> intentionally breaking these pages, just because they don't provide math
> fonts on their platforms ? That sounds weird, to me.

(1) Is it at all common to use MathML with a math font specified as a web font? Can you give an example?

(2) Is it at all common to use MathML only to the extent that it's rendered fine without a math font?

(3) In the cases above, is there usually an image fallback?

Why don't we wait to hear from port owners whether they would actually want to disable MathML for reason of compatibiltiy. Knowing answers to the above questions would help.


> 
> Also I think a runtime flag makes sense for the use case of the Tor
> project, but it is a separate use case IMHO and it should not be
> blocking the removal of the compile-time flag.
> 
> So to summarize, I'm happy to submit a patch to remove ENABLE(MATHML) if
> the only reasons were the two points you mention (which as you said are
> not true here). However, if some port owners provide a concrete
> explanation of why they want to keep the option of disabling MathML then
> I don't think I'll have time to check the runtime option right now, so
> I'll just keep the status quo and it will be up to these people to
> submit a patch or to keep fixing the build failures for --no-mathml ;-)
> 
> -- 
> Frédéric Wang - frederic-wang.fr
> 
>