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Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test
An anonymous reader writes "Frédéric Wang, an engineer at the MathJax project, reports that the latest nightly build of Firefox now passes the MathML Acid2 test. Screenshots in his post show a comparison with the latest nightly Chrome Canary, and it's not pretty. He writes 'Google developers forked Webkit and decided to remove from Blink all the code (including MathML) on which they don't plan to work in the short term.'"
I simply cant believe this...
MathML is a pretty important to allowing papers to be...
It's the worst HTML tag EVER.
I suspect they were using Chrome in a Google Spreadsheet when calculating their bid for Motorola Mobility.
I agree that it's surprising that Chrome seems to fail even on simplistic things. However, Chrome doesn't really feel like the kind of browser that goes for that sort of thing either. Given a choice between MathML and rounded corners (just as an example), I can well imagine that the latter would be far more popular, find wide-spread adoption, and be able to differentiate Chrome from other browsers.
The fairly limited set of publishers/users that would find MathML something that they'd have an absolute need form, seem to be using things that drop in an image of the MathML instead; stumbled across some sites in the past, equation in an image that replaced a piece of text that described the equation. No idea what that site used, but here's an example:
http://dlippman.imathas.com/asciimathtex/AMT.html
I can well imagine that supporting MathML does not exactly have a very high priority. Desktop sharing in Google Hangouts, albeit via a plugin at this time, on the other hand..
Congratulations Mozilla! Still striving for standards means Firefox's job of keeping the others in check is just as important as ever.
Ask a web developer what they think about Chrome?
It is not all positive. It is buggy and has proprietary extensions similiar to something that sounded familiar in the past? Its javascript sometimes does not load on sites and its version of HTML 5 is differnent from others. HTML5test.com tests things that W3C implements a little differently or not at all.
Remember IE 6 was lean mean and standards compliant compared to the god awefull netscape 10 years ago too. Hard to believe in a place like slashdot to admit but if you go read slashdot history on the most discussed stories of all time "What keeps you on Windows from 2002" IE 6 is mentioned!
The switch to a new rendering engine is going to cause issues soon and many corporate oriented SVs and site makers will not be pleased.
http://saveie6.com/
when this exact argument was used against SVG? Now every browser has it, and the pain of using a javascript library shim for the holdouts is gone.
Webkit was caught patching to specifically pass the Acid3 test.
And probably a Pentium with the fdiv problem :)
While LaTeX looks good printed on paper, the default MathJax fonts aren't great on a screen.
There are critics of C++ that say the language is just pieces and parts hacked together. Even if that is true, mathematics takes the undisputed crown of bizarre hacked together symbols.
The symbols used in mathematics are unintelligible, inconsistent, don't even use a standard language character set and cannot be represented in a programming language.
These mathematical symbols either need to be modernized to come to a standardization or die.
The real answer is that they will die. And they should.
Because if it was made easier to understand then the aliens visiting us now would figure out how far behind them our tech is, and conquer us in 7 minutes.
That is rather impressive considering IE doesn't support MathML, and requires a plug in to get it working on IE 7 and 8. The plug-in has some trouble in IE 9 and 10 though, although they might have a beta working now. MS has no plans of adding MathML support and recommend using a MS program to export the equation as an image or using another program to export it as an SVG.
If your browser has good MathML rendering, MathJax can use that.
http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/output.html
IE5 was lean and mean, and about as ideal as you could get for those days (security notwithstanding). The bloat began with IE6, and by then, Netscape was the better browser, feature- and resource-wise.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
When Chrome devs sneeze and accidentally create some flimsy new voice API that does things remotely anyway, the web gives them a shoulder rub.
When Chrome devs give up and fork their browser, that's a big thumbs up.
When Opera gives up the ghost and chooses Google's engine, it's "good job, Google!"
But when Mozilla listens to users and shrinks their memory usage to the point where Chrome can't even compete, "who cares"?
When Mozilla diligently catches up in Javascript performance, even overtaking Google with a clever stopgap solution for improving Javascript, "who cares"?
When Mozilla proves they've solidified a piece of web tech that many people already rely on, "who cares?"
Apparently, Mozilla could be the best browser on earth and people would still scoff at it for not being Google's.
I don't think Google has given up on MathML though, they just are not supporting it until it reaches as usable and stable level in WebKit. Then they will port over that entire chunk of code.
This is a common thing for people doing forks because you don't really want to spend time folding in partially working code from the other guys that brings little benefit. Just wait until it works and do it all in one hit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Remember IE 6 was lean mean and standards compliant compared to the god awefull netscape 10 years ago too.
That's IE 6 great claim to fame. Compared to the bloated corpse of Netscape 4, it looked quite good.
But IE6 came out in the days of Netscape 6
You can star issue 152430 to get support reenabled.
if you want MathMl enabled in Chrome click the star in Issue 152430 to register interest
Under Emacs.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
.
On the other hand, it would be really nice if the Firefox developers fixed their proxy issues, and fixed the javascript engine choking on sites.
The problem with the testerone-induced rapid development cycle is that it apparently leads to a lot of bravado (we're better than Chrome") and little ongoing maintenance of browsing issues.
Sure, you can use workarounds like MathJAX. But it doesn't mean it is more than a workaround. What happens if you want to read some HTML containing formulas while offline?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Netscape 6 was based on an early beta version of Mozilla Suite, somewhere between the last milestone release (M18) and the first real beta (0.7). In fact, IIRC the Mozilla team retconned v0.6 to match what AOL pulled for Netscape 6.0.
The first production-ready version of Mozilla-based Netscape was 7, I think, which was based on Mozilla 1.x.
I don't think many people used Netscape 6.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
But how many of your average users are gonna be going to pages where MathML would be useful? if it was 3% I'd be amazed.
Again with the "if it's not useful to the 51% it's not useful to anyone" meme. For one thing, the Web was invented for use by academia. For another, pretty much everyone who goes to college or even high school ends up seeing an equation at some time.
I used a blinking tag in a non-annoying way: to emulate a DOS like cursor for my temporary landing page.
To simulate a blinking insertion point, you could have used a CSS animation.
What happens if you want to read some HTML containing formulas while offline?
Then make an HTML document with a MathML data island, and have a <script> element in the HTML document reference an offline copy of the JavaScript program that translates MathML to HTML+CSS.
Or get a MiFi.
Wow! It's been a while since I've seen an FDIV joke.
toresbe
The page @ https://eyeasme.com/Joe/MathML/older_MathML_browser_test.html
Displays correctly in FF 3.6.
FWIW, Chrome's result is identical to my default, pre-Chrome, Android 2.6.3 browser. This would make sense if Google had removed the code from Chrome rather than a half-assed version; this must be the default infinit incompetence look.
I take that back. Infinite incompetence would crash. Possibly also infecting the Internet.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
Not in all cases, as shown in historical examples of tyranny of the majority. It lets those with wealth get away with assaults on freedom because the majority don't feel like keeping themselves informed. Case in point: In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of European descent wanted to force "colored" people, mostly of African descent, to use a different drinking fountain. Was that an acceptable compromise to support "the needs of the many"?
there is NO point in adding yet more bloat and complexity to a browser, not to mention giving malware writers one more attack vector in said browser, all to support a teeny tiny niche that would probably just as well if not better supported by using a browser plug in to a real language like Java.
Flash and Java themselves have a track record of being "one more attack vector in said browser".
Hey, I like to typeset music, What if I want my browser to parse musicXML? I need a plugin, deah!