<story><title>MathML is a failed web standard</title><url>https://www.peterkrautzberger.org/0186/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dginev</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how many of the people lamenting MathML ever came to exist are active math-on-the-web developers. I for one am dealing with third-party math equations on a daily basis and can only dream of the wonder of ubiquitous MathML support in all major browsers.&lt;p&gt;The details as to why are here:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prodg.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;mathml_please&amp;#x2F;2015-09-16&amp;#x2F;MathML%20on%20the%20Web%20%E2%80%93%20Please&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prodg.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;mathml_please&amp;#x2F;2015-09-16&amp;#x2F;MathML%20on%2...&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;p&gt;As things stand, math handling on the web is inconvenient at best and a nightmare at worst.&lt;p&gt;Some quick points about the comments here:&lt;p&gt;- MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it&amp;#x27;s meant for the browser&amp;#x2F;machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don&amp;#x27;t read&amp;#x2F;write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML.&lt;p&gt;- Calling MathML a &amp;quot;failed web standard&amp;quot; is fine by me, as long as you continue the remark with &amp;quot;the Chrome and IE browsers have failed mathematicians&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the math-on-the-web developers have failed as a community&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magicalist</author><text>All you&amp;#x27;ve really written here is that you want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, but then you jump to happily taking MathML because it already exists in some places. None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web.&lt;p&gt;The author here is saying we want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, so let&amp;#x27;s make a sane spec that works with the way the web works, not as if it&amp;#x27;s in an embedded foreign object viewer.&lt;p&gt;SVG is actually a great parallel In many instances it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; easy to write by hand, until you go to any level of moderate complexity and hit the brick wall of SVG&amp;#x27;s usability. And that&amp;#x27;s when you wish it had a sane design, because there are a few aspects that are quite close.</text></comment>
<story><title>MathML is a failed web standard</title><url>https://www.peterkrautzberger.org/0186/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dginev</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how many of the people lamenting MathML ever came to exist are active math-on-the-web developers. I for one am dealing with third-party math equations on a daily basis and can only dream of the wonder of ubiquitous MathML support in all major browsers.&lt;p&gt;The details as to why are here:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prodg.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;mathml_please&amp;#x2F;2015-09-16&amp;#x2F;MathML%20on%20the%20Web%20%E2%80%93%20Please&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prodg.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;mathml_please&amp;#x2F;2015-09-16&amp;#x2F;MathML%20on%2...&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;p&gt;As things stand, math handling on the web is inconvenient at best and a nightmare at worst.&lt;p&gt;Some quick points about the comments here:&lt;p&gt;- MathML as a spec is akin to SVG, it&amp;#x27;s meant for the browser&amp;#x2F;machine first, and not for direct human consumption. You don&amp;#x27;t read&amp;#x2F;write SVG by hand, and neither you should MathML.&lt;p&gt;- Calling MathML a &amp;quot;failed web standard&amp;quot; is fine by me, as long as you continue the remark with &amp;quot;the Chrome and IE browsers have failed mathematicians&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the math-on-the-web developers have failed as a community&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erikpukinskis</author><text>Do you think other kinds of content should be included in the web spec too? So, special tags for musical notation, special tags for all forms of maps and geographic, geological features, tags to represent chemical structures, tags for all major forms of engineering notation, etc?&lt;p&gt;To me, it&amp;#x27;s not that I don&amp;#x27;t think there is a use case for MathML, it&amp;#x27;s that it&amp;#x27;s too content-specific to make sense at the browser level.&lt;p&gt;The only way it makes sense in my head is if I think of math as a language that browsers should support on the basis of internationalization. That makes some sense to me, but if that&amp;#x27;s the idea then OP is right they should use standard notation (as we do for every other language) and not XML, and it shouldn&amp;#x27;t be styleable by CSS at all.</text></comment>