mi-tag with mathvariant creates extra spans

Created by: Diaan

I have an mi-tag with multiple characters in it that I want printed italic. According to the MathML specs I should add the mathvariant attribute and set it to italic. This works, it prints the contents italic, but it also adds unnecessary span-tags; all but the first character are in a seperate span with the font-family set as a style property. This causes issues for me because I copy the generated HTML and the extra spans cause issues there.

I found the issue started arising in version 2.4. I made two codepens, one with version 2.3-latest, which can be found here And one with 2.7-latest, which can be found here I've added some css to show the spans in the generated code. I also added some alternative versions, with mtext and mo-tags, also using mathvariant="italic", but with those there are no issues.

Is this a feature that can somehow be disabled with a configuration setting or is it a bug?