Sponsorship

Igalia has become the primary sponsor for the implementation of MathML in Chromium, to continue improvement of test coverage, and interoperability, as well as work around MathML standard at W3C. The project was started in 2019 with primary sponsorship from NISO/Sloan Foundation as well as support from Pearson Publishing, APS, and other community donors. We have become the primary sponsor because we understand the current worldwide challenges and wish to continue the project moving forward. We greatly appreciate financial sponsorship both past and present, and would happily engage with interested parties. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor please contact us.

Math contents today are well rendered in Firefox and WebKit-based browsers. We believe they will be greatly accessible once MathML gets implemented in the most widely used browser, Chrome, which accounts for 60% of market share in desktop and 85% of market share in mobile platforms. The journey to implementation of MathML in Chromium has held many discussions and we would like to share a few “insights” from the community.

Statements of Support

Universal native support of MathML (as part of HTML5) in all major browsers will enable the scientific community to exchange scientific results directly on the web. Moreover, scientists will be able to start using the full set of features of HTML5, which provides significant advantages over paper-based formats such as PDF. In the long run, scientific content will be generated for the web - not for print. After the recent advantages in SVG image rendering MathML is one of the last blockers that prevent the shift from print-based to a web-based publication workflow.

For Wikimedia, we have implemented full support for MathML. The new MathML based version of Wikipedia ist robust, fast, scalable, and accessible. However, we do deliver this version by default, because it is challenging to determine if browsers are capable to support MathML. Therefore, this new version of Wikipedia is hidden to all users, that did not explicitly configure their browser to show it.

If Chrome supports MathML, a content provider can deliver MathML as default.

The publishing industry pays close attention to what makes books possible or impossible. From the capacity of printing plants to changes in copyright law to the features in InDesign, many factors determine what can be done. But publishers don't realize that web browsers are also a critical piece of their infrastructure, which determine what's possible or impossible for their websites, ebooks, and learning platforms. A good example is math. Displaying math on the web and in ebooks has been complicated. MathML was supported by some browsers and some reading systems, but not all. Publishers were forced to use inaccessible images or complex JavaScript libraries like MathJax. Having all browsers support MathML was just a dream. But that dream is now becoming a reality, due to the leadership of Igalia. Igalia is implementing MathML in Chrome, fixing bugs in Safari and Firefox, and helping write better tests and a better spec. We are in a new era, where consultancies like Igalia, who work closely with all browser vendors, can make new features possible. Their work deserves our support.