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.'"

Comments

Re:Who cares?

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:chrome fails MathML acid1

[dgatwood]

The reason to improve MathML support isn't browsers. It's eBook readers that share the underlying rendering engines. Lots of textbook publishers want to use MathML, but without robust, reliable, visually appealing support, everybody has to do awful hacks with inline images or (hopefully) SVG instead.

Re:Math symbols are so archaic so who gives a F

[maxwell demon]

Just a note—sin^2(x) cannot be sin(sin(x)) because that is a datatype error.

You just showed that you don't know enough mathematics.

The input to the sine function is not an angle, it is a real or complex number. If real, this number often (but not always!) describes some angle. If complex, it obviously won't describe an angle.

The sine function is defined as

sin x = (exp(i x) - exp(-i x)) / (2i)

where i is the imaginary number, and exp(x) is defined by the series

exp x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + ... + x^n/n! + ...

Note that, since the convergence radius of the exponential series is infinite, and the sine is just a linear combination of exponentials, the sine is defined on all complex numbers. Since it is complex-valued, sin sin x is indeed well defined for all complex numbers x.

Moreover, if you restrict the sine to real numbers (that is, only accept real numbers), you still have a well defined sin sin x, because the real sine function is also real-valued (more exactly, its values are restricted to the interval [-1,1]).

Also, the output is in general not a rational number (the only thing you could have meant with "ratio" that makes sense in this context).