"None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web."
I can't but see these as secondary to why MathML isn't supported yet. The current state works already well enough in Firefox, but no one would use it, since why support a single browser? And we've had it working nicely in Chrome before the devs pulled the plug because of lack of manpower. You could try to overrule the cruft from say the upcoming HTML5.1 spec, and find a good alignment with CSS. If it proves annoying or impossible, you could take the process further towards a MathML 4 that offers a CSS-compatible subset, etc. And the W3C Math group could approve of an experimental note much quicker, so that we don't sit around for years waiting for the standardization process.
The web mathematics community is a small one, and most of us have strong opinions on MathML. The way this debate is heading will tear the community in various tinier subfractions and likely continue the "math-on-the web winter" for another decade.
In my eyes, nothing has changed really - we've had browsers silently complicit in ignoring MathML, and a community tiny enough to not be able to move them in any direction. The two important bits for a math-on-the-web developer to have sanity are 1) expose the mathematics content of a page as data (the way we do tables) and 2) do so in a standard cross-browser way. Anything else leads to insane hacks, and tools such as math search engines, clipboards etc. can not be implemented directly.
I can't but see these as secondary to why MathML isn't supported yet. The current state works already well enough in Firefox, but no one would use it, since why support a single browser? And we've had it working nicely in Chrome before the devs pulled the plug because of lack of manpower. You could try to overrule the cruft from say the upcoming HTML5.1 spec, and find a good alignment with CSS. If it proves annoying or impossible, you could take the process further towards a MathML 4 that offers a CSS-compatible subset, etc. And the W3C Math group could approve of an experimental note much quicker, so that we don't sit around for years waiting for the standardization process.
The web mathematics community is a small one, and most of us have strong opinions on MathML. The way this debate is heading will tear the community in various tinier subfractions and likely continue the "math-on-the web winter" for another decade.
In my eyes, nothing has changed really - we've had browsers silently complicit in ignoring MathML, and a community tiny enough to not be able to move them in any direction. The two important bits for a math-on-the-web developer to have sanity are 1) expose the mathematics content of a page as data (the way we do tables) and 2) do so in a standard cross-browser way. Anything else leads to insane hacks, and tools such as math search engines, clipboards etc. can not be implemented directly.