MathML
(under construction)

Last Update:  31 January, 2005; RKH

Good representation of mathematical formulae and expressions on web pages is a chronic problem for education and research. The markup language MathML, based on SGML (as is HTML), provides both syntactic and semantic markup, under development.

 

The World-Wide Web Consortium pages at www.w3c.org/Math.

1. Go to the Design Science "Gentle Introduction to MathML," (given as the first entry under "Tutorials" at the W3C Math website above), at http://www.dessci.com/en/support/tutorials/mathml/, click on "The Big Picture," and look at the middle of the page.
2. Look at the Presentation MathML example at http://www.w3c.org/Math/XSL/pmathml2.xml. View source to see the tags.
3. Look at the Content MathML example at http://www.w3c.org/Math/XSL/csmall2.xml.

For a browser test:

Click on "test page" at the W3C Math site (same as the Presentation example).

For a full introduction:

See Michael Kohlhase's slides (PDF) at http://www.w3c.org/Math/Documents/mathml-tutorial.pdf (given as the second entry under "Tutorials")

Those who use TeX or LaTeX will want a tool that converts their sophisticated LaTeX source to MathML. The program TtM, from http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/mml/ seems to do the job, but needs tuning. That TtM website provides a handy test window for expression conversion.