Achievement Unlocked: Intent to Mathify

We are about to reach a very unique and honestly pretty epic moment in standards history, and most people probably won’t even notice. It’s also personally meaningful to me, so I’d like to tell you about it and why it’s worth celebrating it…

Igalia just filed an Intent to Ship support for MathML-Core in Chromium. If you’re not familliar with what an intent to ship means - the blink release process involves several stages before something gets to ship. An intent to ship marks the beginning of the final step which allows the feature to just work by default in stable releases.

I know, I know. Many website developers will think “that doesn’t help me much and I have all these other problems which I would love to solve instead”. But… that’s kind of the problem and why this is momentus in several ways.

MathML has a wildly interesting history. At some level, the need for being able to display mathematical text seem like it would have been obvious from the web’s start at CERN, right? It was! In fact, support for rendering some math existed in CERNs experimental browser in 1993. Graphics too. It’s unsurprising then that SVG and MathML were among the first active working groups at the W3C when it was established. MathML was, in fact, the first XML oriented standard that the W3C ever published with it’s first recommendation coming in April 1998. For reference that’s over a year before HTML 4.0.1 reached REC… During the “HTML5” split it, along with SVG was specially integrated into the new, very well defined parser.

So why is it suddenly “news?”.

Well… It is complicated, and I wrote one of my personally favorite pieces explaining it all at the beginning of 2019, before I came to work at Igalia. Really, I think it is enjoyable and you should read it, but the TL;DR version is that standards implementations, and their prioritization is voluntary. In the same way that many developers are focused on shopping and selling and animations and layout and better modularization and… lots of other problems - there were just more appealing things on their plates which would appease a wider audience. There are millions of equations in Wikipedia alone, but we don’t think about it so much because we’ve developed plenty of clever (and often not-so-clever) workarounds to deal with “until the last one lands”.

And so progress was slower than normal. Volunteers did an amazing amount of the actual implementation work in many cases. And then, just as it looked like we were about to cross a finish line, Chrome forked WebKit and decided that - for now - they were going to rip out the newly landed MathML which had some problems to make it easier for them to refactor major parts of the engine. And then the way we do standards changed. We got more rigorous over the years. Basically - the story just kept getting worse. It was almost like we were going backwards for math on the web.

By 2018 or so it was looking pretty unable to be righted. Igalia was provided many arguments about how hard the problem was, and the scale of actually righting the ship. It was more than just 1 more implementation, which would already have been a huge effort - it was about re-establishing a working group, specifying all of the previously unspecified things, in a way that fit the platform (coordinating with many other working groups and WHATWG on various details), going through a review with the W3C Technical Architecture Group, and so on.

But, here we are.

Setting this right isn’t just historically unique in that way either: I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that no non-browser organization has ever landed something of this kind of scale before - and they’ve never done it with some aid from various funding sources either. While Igalia wound up footing the lion’s share of the bill ourselves, we also had financial support at stages from NISO and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, APS Physics, and Pearson and a small collection of donors that included $75k from two people. Really, in many ways, that effort was the pre-cursor to our whole Open Prioritization idea.

Personal notes

For me, I have a lot of personal connections to this that make it meaningful. As I said in Harold Crick and the Web Platform, I might be partially responsible for its delays.

Little did he know, he’d get deeply involved in helping solve that problem.

When I came to Igalia, it was one of my first projects.

I helped fix some things. The first Web Platform Test I ever contributed was for MathML. I think the first WHATWG PR I ever sent was on MathML. The first BlinkOn Lightning Talk I ever did was about - you guessed it, MathML. The first W3C Charter I ever helped write? That’s right: About MathML. The first actual Working Group I’ve ever chaired (well, co-chaired) is about Math. The first explainer I ever wrote myself was about MathML. The first podcast I ever hosted was on… Guess what? MathML. And so on.

And here’s the thing: I am perhaps the least mathematically minded person you will ever meet. But we did the right thing. A good thing. And we did it a good way, and for good reasons.

A few episodes later on our podcast we had Rick Byers from Chrome and Rossen Atanassov from Microsoft on the show, and Rick brought up MathML. Both of them were hugely impressed and supportive of it even back then - Rick said

I fully expect MathML to ship at some point and it’ll ship in Chrome… Even though from Google’s business perspective, it probably wouldn’t have been a good return on investment for us to do it… I’m thrilled that Igalia was able to do it.

By then, there was a global pandemic underway and Rossen pointed out…

I’m looking forward to it. Look, I… I’m a huge supporter of having a native math into into the engines, MathML… And having the ability to, at the end of the day, increase the edu market, which will benefit the most out of it. Especially, you know, having been through one full semester of having a middle school student at home, and having her do all of her work through online tools… Having better edu support will go a long way. So, thank you on behalf all of the students, future students that will benefit

And… yeah, that’s kind of it right? There’s this huge thing that has no special seeming obvious ROI for browsers, that doesn’t have every developer in the world screaming for it but it’s really great for society and kind of important to serve this niche because it underpins the ability of student, physicists, mathematicians etc to communicate with text.

Mission Accomplished Progress

Anyway… Wow. This is huge, I think, in so many ways.

I’m gonna go raise a glass to everyone who helped achieve this astonishingly huge thing.

I think it says so much about our ability to do things together and promise for the ecosystem and how it could work.

I sort of wish I could just say “Mission Accomplished” but the truth is that this is a beginning, not an end. It means we have really good support of parsing and rendering (assuming some math capable fonts) tons and tons of math interoperably, and a spec for how it needs to integrate with the whole rest of the platform, but only 1 implementation of that bit. Now we have to align the others implementations the same way so that we really have just One Platform and all of it can move forward together and no part gets left behind again.

Then, beyond that is MathML-Core Level 2. Level 1 draws a box around what was practically able to be aligned in the first pass - but it leaves a few hard problems on the table which really need solving. Many of these have some partial solutions in the other 2 browsers already but are hard to specify and integrate.

I have a lot of faith that we can reach both of those goals, but to do it takes investment. I really hope that reaching this milestone helps convince organizations and vendors to contribute toward reaching them. I’d encourage everyone to give the larger ecosystem some thought and consider how we can support good efforts - even maybe directly.

If you'd like to understand the argument for this better, my friend and colleague at Igalia Eric Meyer presented an excellent talk when we announced it...