[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Proposal: switch to HTML 5

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I have been looking around to see what effect this might have on
> rendering of mathematics. Is that potentially good, but only if everyone
> agrees to usethe right browsers?

It's easier to embed MathML (and SVG) into HTML 5 than into XHTML, yes
-- with XHTML you need to serve as XML before it works in any browser,
AFAIK.  And we don't want to serve as XML due to fatal errors on
malformedness.  Currently I think only Firefox 3.6 nightlies support
embedded MathML, and only if you set html5.enable to true in
about:config, but sooner or later widespread support is likely.

There's a MathML output option in the math preferences.  I don't know
if it actually works.  But it could be made to, undoubtedly, without
too much trouble, if we have a safe and reliable LaTeX -> MathML
converter.  Obviously it couldn't be the default until we get a lot
more uptake of MathML.  It would be neat if we could get it working
well and then use some kind of sniffing to determine whether to use
MathML or PNG, but that would be tricky.

I'd like to emphasize again, though, that these benefits are
*long-term*.  There will be *no* immediate user-visible difference
between XHTML 1.0 and HTML 5 for users of web browsers, or nearly all
bot operators.