Blog de Frédéric

For those who missed the news, Google Chrome 24 has recently been released with native MathML support. I'd like to thank Dave Barton again for his efforts during the past year, that have allowed to make this happen. Obviously, some people may ironize on how long it took for Google to make this happen (Mozilla MathML project started in 1999) or criticize the bad rendering quality. However the MathML folks, aware of the history of the language in browsers, will tend to be more tolerant and appreciate this important step towards MathML adoption. After all, this now means that among the most popular browsers, Firefox, Safari and Chrome have MathML support and Opera a basic CSS-based implementation. This also means that about three people out of four will be able to read pages with MathML without the need of any third-party rendering engine.

After some testing, I think the Webkit MathML support is now good enough to be used on my Website. There are a few annoyances with stretchy characters or positioning, but in general the formulas are readable. Hence in order to encourage the use of MathML and let people report bugs upstream and hopefully help to fix them, I decided to rely on the native MathML support for Webkit-based browsers. I'll still keep MathJax for Internet Explorer (when MathPlayer is not installed) and Opera.

I had the chance to meet Dave Barton when I was at the Silicon Valley last October for the GSoC mentor summit. We could exchange our views on the MathML implementations in browsers and discuss the perspectives for the future of MathML. The history of MathML in Webkit is actually quite similar to Gecko's one: one volunteer Alex Milowski decided to write the initial implementation. This idea attracted more volunteers who joined the effort and helped to add new features and to conduct the project. Dave told me that the initial Webkit implementation did not pass the Google's security review and that's why MathML was not enabled in Chrome. It was actually quite surprising that Apple decided to enable it in Safari and in particular all Apple's mobile products. Dave's main achievement has been to fix all these security bugs so that MathML could finally appear in Chrome.

One of the idea I share with Dave is how important it is to have native MathML support in browsers, rather than to delegate the rendering to Javascript libraries like MathJax or browser plug-in like MathPlayer. That's always a bit sad to see that third-party tools are necessary to improve the native browser support of a language that is sometimes considered a core XML language for the Web together with XHTML and SVG. Not only native support is faster but also it integrates better in the browser environment: zooming text, using links, applying CSS style, mixing with SVG diagrams, doing dynamic updates with e.g. Javascript etc all of the features Web users are familiar with are immediately available. In order to illustrate this concretely, here is a couple of demos. Some of them are inspired from the Mozilla's MathML demo pages, recently moved to MDN. By the way, the famous MathML torture page is now here. Also, try this test page to quickly determine whether you need to install additional fonts.

Note that although Dave was focused on improving MathML, the language naturally integrates with the rest of Webkit's technologies and almost all the demos above work as expected, without any additional efforts. Actually, Gecko's MathML support relies less on the CSS layout engine than Webkit does and this has been a recurrent source of bugs. For example in the first demo, the text-shadow property is not applied to some operators (bug 827039) while it is in Webkit.

In my opinion, one of the problem with MathML is that the browser vendors never really shown a lot of interest in this language and the standardization and implementation efforts were mainly lead and funded by organizations from the publishing industry or by volunteer contributors. As the MathML WG members keep repeating, they would love to get more feedback from the browser developers. This is quite a problem for a language that has among the main goal the publication of mathematics on the Web. This leads for example to MathML features (some of them are now deprecated) duplicating CSS properties or to the <mstyle> element which has most of its attributes unused and do similar things as CSS inheritance in an incompatible way. As a consequence, it was difficult to implement all MathML features properly in Gecko and this is the source of many bugs like the one I mention in the previous paragraph.

Hopefully, the new MathML support in Chrome will bring more interest to MathML from contributors or Web companies. Dave told me that Google could hire a full-time engineer to work on MathML. Apparently, this is mostly because of demands from companies working on Webkit-based mobile devices or involved in EPUB. Although I don't have the same impression from Mozilla Corporation at the moment, I'm confident that with the upcoming FirefoxOS release, things might change a bit.

Finally I also expect that we, at MathJax, will continue to accompany the MathML implementations in browsers. One of the ideas I proposed to the team was to let MathJax select the output mode according to the MathML features supported by the browser. Hence the native MathML support could be used if the page contains only basic mathematics while MathJax's rendering engine will be used when more advanced mathematical constructions are involved. Another goal to achieve will be to make MathJax the default rendering in Wikipedia, which will be much better than the current raster image approach and will allow the users to switch to their browser's MathML support if they wish...