[webkit-dev] MathML Refresh Heads up

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 3:08 AM Frédéric Wang <fwang at igalia.com> wrote:

> Hello WebKit developers,
>
> As some of you may know, Igalia is working on MathML support in Chromium
> this year [1]. As part of that effort we joined a new MathML Refresh
> Community Group [2] and one goal is to focus on a core spec for browser
> implementations [3] to:
> - Remove deprecated/uncommon/duplicate math features that could be
> implemented by polyfills (relying on MathML core and other web
> technologies).
>

I'd be very much concerned about backwards compatibility here when it come
to removing any features.
It's important to notice that WebKit is also used by hundreds of thousands
of iOS apps and macOS apps.
How do we know we won't break those applications?

In general, I don't agree with whatever Google said about MathML being too
complex, etc...

- Add more detailed algorithms (based on TeX/OpenType/CSS layout) to
> help implementation and conformance testing.
> - Align MathML with CSS/HTML (parsing, layout...), introducing new web
> platform features (CSS, fonts...) for math if necessary.
>

On the other hand, these seem like very valuable improvements.

We expect that this effort will improve browser interoperability and
> reduce complexity of current implementations.
>

Given there aren't too many websites that deploy MathML directly on
production, my concerns are more about existing iOS and madOS apps that
embed WKWebView or WebView / UIWebView and use MathML.

- R. Niwa
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