Page MenuHomePhabricator

Make SVG with PNG fallback mode
Closed, InvalidPublic

Assigned To
None
Authored By
Esanders
Mar 5 2016, 1:19 PM
Referenced Files
F3529348: signature.asc
Mar 5 2016, 4:25 PM
F3529282: 120px-Latin_alphabet_Aa.svg.png
Mar 5 2016, 4:20 PM
Tokens
"Heartbreak" token, awarded by Physikerwelt.

Description

If your browser supports SVG (most do: http://caniuse.com/#search=svg) there's no reason to use PNG. While we have a separate mode for MathML as it is still not widely supported, but SVG is now the default in MediaWiki development.

Currently we have no way of turning on SVG as the global default without turning on MathML as well, which still has problems (T74553)

Event Timeline

Esanders renamed this task from Make PNG mode, SVG with PNG fallback to Make PNG mode SVG with PNG fallback.Mar 5 2016, 1:19 PM
Esanders renamed this task from Make PNG mode SVG with PNG fallback to Make SVG with PNG fallback mode.Mar 5 2016, 1:21 PM

SVG has way more problems than mathml. Especially the use of SVG images for simple math fragments such as individual variables is horrible. Moreover note that the SVG images tend to look blury in IE, thats why it makes sense in some cases to use PNG images, even if SVG is marked as supported.

Moreover, T74553 is about problems with SVG images not with MathML. Thus I'm closing this as invalid for now.

Especially the use of SVG images for simple math fragments such as individual variables is horrible

Why?

I was thinking that this would be obvious...
Mathematical expressions are used as part of natural langauge. Of course one can use images to represent all non ascii characters, but that really does not integrate well. It's too bad that some browsers don't support math. The people that read and write math frequenty are certainly a minority. But it adds up over the large variety of natural languages.
Imagine 'a' would be a special character and all 'a' is the text were represented by an image

120px-Latin_alphabet_Aa.svg.png (35×120 px, 1 KB)
. For example there would not be a way to search for words in the text that contain 'a' using your broswers build in intext search. (cf. https://twitter.com/physikerwelt/status/698841413853835264)

I think the right way to go is to respect this minority and provide the standard conform markup as default and fallbacks for the browsers that do not fully support HTML5. You are very welcome to join the discussion on T78046 but I really want to avoid to add yet another rendering mode.