Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test 134
An anonymous reader writes "Frédéric Wang, an engineer at the MathJax project, reports that the latest nightly build of Firefox now passes the MathML Acid2 test. Screenshots in his post show a comparison with the latest nightly Chrome Canary, and it's not pretty. He writes 'Google developers forked Webkit and decided to remove from Blink all the code (including MathML) on which they don't plan to work in the short term.'"
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask a web developer what they think about Chrome?
It is not all positive. It is buggy and has proprietary extensions similiar to something that sounded familiar in the past [pcmag.com]? Its javascript sometimes does not load on sites and its version of HTML 5 is differnent from others. HTML5test.com tests things that W3C implements a little differently or not at all.
Remember IE 6 was lean mean and standards compliant compared to the god awefull netscape 10 years ago too. Hard to believe in a place like slashdot to admit but if you go read slashdot history on the most discussed stories of all time "What keeps you on Windows from 2002" IE 6 is mentioned!
The switch to a new rendering engine is going to cause issues soon and many corporate oriented SVs and site makers will not be pleased.
Re:chrome fails MathML acid1 (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a real shame -- MathML is abysmal.
A few zillion years ago, we had the math tag, which was similar to TeX. It died on the vine, but would have been MUCH better than the cruel joke that is MathML.
You're thinking of Chrome and Safari (Score:4, Insightful)
Webkit was caught patching to specifically pass the Acid3 test. [vasanth.in]
Re:Math symbols are so archaic so who gives a F (Score:2, Insightful)
Mathematics is one of those fields that could use some ISO standards.
There are critics of C++ that say the language is just pieces and parts hacked together. Even if that is true, mathematics takes the undisputed crown of bizarre hacked together symbols.
The symbols used in mathematics are unintelligible, inconsistent, don't even use a standard language character set and cannot be represented in a programming language.
These mathematical symbols either need to be modernized to come to a standardization or die.
What the hell? I can believe how incredibly ignorant is this comment. Do you even work with mathematics? The symbols used in mathematics are jargon to be sure, but every (non-trivial) field of endeavours has its jargon. And that jargon makes mathematics significantly easier to work with day-to-day for its practitioners.
You make it sound like mathematics deliberately chose symbols and syntax that was difficult to implement in a programming language, as if that's the pinnacle of the written form. Of course, mathematics predates programming languages by centuries if not millenia. And the symbol it uses are part of a standard language character set, just not those that has yet been popular in the (relative) young computer world. You're comparing mathematics to a single programming language. You should instead compare mathematics to every programming language combined.
Your comment makes as much sense as suggesting we should make all computer languages like COBOL. Sure, it makes the actual words more readable and standardised, but it doesn't help the layperson because the average person isn't going to read any computer languages anyway. And it hinders any computer programmer by making it more difficult and wordy to express complicated concepts.