These days, I’m working on the slides for my next talk, “The humble border-radius”. It will be about how much work is put into CSS features that superficially look as simple as border-radius, as well as what advances are in store for it in CSS Backgrounds & Borders 4 (of which I’m an editor). It will be fantastic and you should come, but this post is not about my talk.
As you may know, my slides are made with HTML, CSS & JavaScript. At some point, I wanted to insert an equation to show how border-top-left-radius (as an example) shrinks proportionally when the sum of radii on the top side exceeds the width of the element. I don’t like LaTeX because it produces bitmap images that don’t scale and is inaccessible. The obvious open standard to use was MathML, and it can even be directly embedded in HTML5 without all the XML cruft, just like SVG. I had never written MathML before, but after a bit of reading and poking around existing samples, I managed to write the following MathML code: