Semi-relatedly, I think even the linear form of UnicodeMath [1] is very readable, and it would be great if there was more support for building it up into nicer presentation forms in the browser wild (MathJax has had it on the backlog since at least 2015, for instance), as that seems to me to be a better "fallback" situation than raw MathML given its readability when not built up.
> I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with.
CSS Grid [2] is the happiest path today. It's a really happy path (I want these columns, this wide, done). CSS Flexbox [3] is a bit older and nearly as happy a path. Some really powerful things can be used with the combination of both, especially in responsive design (a dense two dimensional grid on large widescreen displays collapsing to a simple flexbox "one dimensional" flow, for example).
Flexbox may be seen as primitive in a few years, but Grid finally seems exactly where things should have always been (and what people were trying to accomplish way back when with tables or worse framesets). Even then, Flexbox may be mostly seen as primitive from the sense of "simple lego/duplo tool" compared to Grid's more precise/powerful/capable tools.
Thanks for mentioning UnicodeMath. That does seems like a better fallback solution than raw MathML. It appears there's a newer version of the document you linked to that was posted on HN, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936
Thanks for mentioning grid, as that's a tool I've not looked at myself.
CSS columns and Grid are not entirley substitutable, though they share some properties.
I see Columns as a way of flowing text within some bounding box, whilst Grid is preferred for arranging textual components on a page, more akin to paste-up in Aldus Pagemaker (am I dating myself) though on the rubber sheet of the HTML viewport rather than on fixed paper sizes.
Yeah, they are very different things. One is for text/inline flow and the other block flow. As a fan of CSS Columns (multicol) I hope that the interaction between Columns and Grid gets better standardized. (In my case I wanted better support for embedding Grids in columns; my tests worked in everything but Firefox. So it is interesting to me that Firefox seems the most interested in pushing multicol forward as a standard [1], since it stopped being a Trident/Spartan priority when Windows 8.1/10 abandoned multicol as a key UX principle of Windows 8 apps.)
[1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf
> I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with.
CSS Grid [2] is the happiest path today. It's a really happy path (I want these columns, this wide, done). CSS Flexbox [3] is a bit older and nearly as happy a path. Some really powerful things can be used with the combination of both, especially in responsive design (a dense two dimensional grid on large widescreen displays collapsing to a simple flexbox "one dimensional" flow, for example).
Flexbox may be seen as primitive in a few years, but Grid finally seems exactly where things should have always been (and what people were trying to accomplish way back when with tables or worse framesets). Even then, Flexbox may be mostly seen as primitive from the sense of "simple lego/duplo tool" compared to Grid's more precise/powerful/capable tools.
[2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
[3] https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox