texvc is able to produce MathML for some input (currently just some
very simple text, not complex equations). When using XHTML output, it's
possible to embed MathML directly in the text such that Mozilla and
maybe Amaya can render it inline:
<math
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">bla bla</math>
Is this a useful thing we should support, is it worth the trouble?
Good:
* Text can be cut-n-pasted
* Can scale with zoomed font sizes and for printouts
* Inherits user overrides of forward and background colors
* Transparency with no alpha channel tricks
These would be good for users requiring large font sizes or
high-contrast displays;transparent PNGs that hard-code a black
foreground will be illegible for a user who forces white-on-black text.
All the above points are true of hacky HTML output as well, but hacky
HTML doesn't tend to look that good, particularly for fractions,
radicals, etc where positioning is hard to do right.
Bad:
* Needs more work on texvc to be useful for non-trivial equations.
* Supported by few browsers. Either a browser detect or an explicit
user option must be used. We'd prefer to only have one canonical
rendering to simplify caching.[1]
* Mozilla complains at the user that they don't have special math fonts
installed, which is rather annoying.
[1] A sick and evil option may be to introduce the MathML at load time
via JavaScript+DOM upon determining that browser should support it. As
with all such solutions this won't function with JavaScript disabled
and is thus suboptimal.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)