[Building Sakai] mathml support

[Adam Marshall]

Gadzooks! I hadn't noticed that the maths notation was an image, I was looking at the source view of the page and saw "data-mathml=" so assumed that MathML was being used natively so-to-speak.

Very neat! I will reset my worry-o-meter back to Amber (its default state).

Having said that I note that the MathML pop up edit window doesnt behave well at all on narrow browser windows.

Adam



From: Sam Ottenhoff [mailto:ottenhoff at longsight.com]
Sent: 27 February 2014 16:00
To: Adam Marshall
Cc: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org Developers
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] mathml support


On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk<mailto:adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:
I see that ckedit in Sakai 10 has MathML functionality.

Can you be more specific?  The default editor config does have integration with FMath which allows users to create complex equations via a GUI.  The end result is an image.



Looking at <http://caniuse.com/mathml> it would appear that the standard is barely supported. Is this chart wrong? (A quick test indicates that Chrome, Opera and Firefox all display the formulae that I've entered, so maybe it is.)

Does anybody have any more info?


The chart is correct.  There has never been good browser support for MathML rendering in the browser.



I'm worried that adding this functionality looks risky - what if Chrome & IE completely remove support?

The FMath editor creates images because browsers have offered such lousy support for MathML.



I would have thought that it would be best to leave institutions to decide themselves whether they want to take the risk.

The CKEditor config is easy to modify in a single JS file (ckeditor.launch.js).  Institutions continue to be free to modify the default config and use other editors like the completely Javascript-based editor from WIRIS (http://www.wiris.com/en/).  We felt that including a free editor by default that produces images made the Sakai default build better.

--Sam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20140227/c3e2d8f7/attachment.html