As a follow-up to the discussions about the new Math rendering options, I'd like to raise the question of how to write the preferences in way that will really be helpful to the users.
I made a little patch at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/167024/
It only fixes some minor things, and the problem is wider: How is a person supposed to choose the best option? What are "modern browsers"? If one thing is "recommended" for modern browsers, and another "improves (or enhances) rendering on modern", which one should I choose? What is "slow"? Why is improved visual rendering mixed with accessibility in *two* options? Which accessibility features do I get in each option? Are they even different?
These options confused me for years as a Wikipedia user. The recent developments in Math are great technically (kudos to Moritz, Gabriel, TheDJ and everybody else who was involved!), but the options are still not so helpful. Let's fix them! Suggestions?..
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Amir,
On 10/25/2014 01:16 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
As a follow-up to the discussions about the new Math rendering options, I'd like to raise the question of how to write the preferences in way that will really be helpful to the users.
I made a little patch at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/167024/
thank you for your patch, I just merged it.
I agree that the current options are confusing. We should be able to improve things a bit further by tweaking the descriptions, but in the longer term we are working towards having only a single mode that works really well, out of the box, for everybody.
Before we can consider moving to One True Math mode, we need more refinement and testing, both with older browsers and various accessibility tools. It would also be nice to reduce the size of the SVG fall-back images, which are currently about 50% larger than the (low-resolution) PNGs. Thankfully, users with MathML-enabled browsers like Firefox don't even load them, and are now saving bandwidth relative to PNGs.
Why is improved visual rendering mixed with accessibility in *two* options? Which accessibility features do I get in each option? Are they even different?
As I understand it, client-side MathJax still defaults to an HTML+CSS rendering mode on browsers without MathML support, which provides better accessibility than the PNGs on IE < 9 (so hardly 'modern'). It also has some nifty context menu features like zooming, but this could also be added to the server-side MathML mode. I added Moritz and Peter in the CC, maybe they can chime in.
Gabriel
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