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IE really has come a very very long way since v7, and has gone from being a totally backwards abomination that impedes progress and gives webmasters nightmares to being a mostly OK browser. Outside of royalty-free codec support (which everyone knew MS would drag their feet on) there's only one way that its backwardness still impacts me: MathML.

Gecko-based browsers have had native support for over a decade (enabled by default starting with Mozilla milestone 0.9.9). Safari has had native support for a year and a half, and Chrome is finally about to release its first version with native support. But IE only has access via a third-party plugin. Worse, the plugin was broken with the release of IE9. A year ago, the developer made a "preview release" version of the plugin that's supposed to work with IE 9, but it's buggy and inconsistent and hasn't been updated.

It's frustrating that almost 15 years after MathML was standardized we've still got browser developers dragging their feet.

Whoops, left out a delimiting quotation mark, should have previewed. Trying again:

I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow HTML5+MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.

It seems to me that everybody is moaning and groaning about what a bad job WHATWG is doing, when in fact WHATWG is just doing the best it can in an extremely difficult environment created by patents and Microsoft.

The confusion with respect to audio and video codecs only exists because of patents. A certain patent-encumbered codec shows up that's good enough, so it gets widely adopted, and then it's impossible to displace it because of network effects. This is not WHATWG's fault.

The html 5 feature that I really care about is mathml, and here it's very, very clear that MS is the bad guy and W3C and WHATWG have just been trying, unsuccessfully, to work around MS. Mathml worked fine in xhtml years ago, but MS never bothered to support xhtml in IE, which would have been technically trivial to do. They stated that their policy was to have independent vendors supply support for mathml rendering via plugins, and Design Science did their best to do that, but MS made it impossible for them to do that in a standard way, because the standard depended on xhtml, which IE didn't support. So xhtml died in the crib, and WHATWG decided to pour the svg and mathml namespaces into the flat html 5 namespace. Kind of an ugly solution, but they had no other choice. Now for the first time it is theoretically possible to write a web page coded in a standard way that has mathml in it and that might render properly in some future version of IE. But meanwhile big institutions are still sticking to IE 6 because they need compatibility with all its bugs, and preview versions of IE 9 have broken mathml support.

The big problem is that commercial entities have interests that oppose the interests of their customers and internet users at large. MS wants users to be locked into their browser through proprietary plugins and bug-compatibility, and they don't stand to profit by supporting features like mathml, which are only used by a relatively small proportion of their users. (Never mind that blind people can access mathml but not bitmapped renderings of equations. Blind people aren't economically important to MS.) Owners of patents on codecs want to harvest licensing fees, and they don't care if that screws everybody else up and makes a mess out of audio and video on the web.

McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense? These are the people who acually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.

I work in the education industry. For all of our test & test prep materials, we use a program called MathType. It's quick, easy and supports advanced mathematical formulas.

http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/
Cheers!

Equation writers are historically very bad, especially industry leader Mathtype; they're proprietary, clunky and generally unfriendly. OpenOffice Math is suitably primitive, forcing users to type their equations in a non-standard markup language before they are rendered.

Enter Office 2007 with a new and much improved equation editor. Like WordPerfect has for years Microsoft has included a crippled yet somewhat capable version of MathType, complete with ads for an improved version (that's not so improved), However, in Office 2007 Microsoft has bothered to create a very new and streamline equation editor. Furthermore, it blows out the market for MathML generation tools in terms of ease of use. Coupled with new first class support for managing Works Cited and other academic essentials, Word is an outstanding academic word processing program.

Lets review, Word 2007 is:

• User friendly for the non-computer geek (yes, that's right, not every academic is a computer science geek)
• Optimized for serious academic word processing without a huge learning curve, complete with generous pricing for academic endevors
• Open, standards compliant equation editor
• The best word processor ever (okay, that admittedly arguable and a larger debate)

Yet these journals want people to use inferior software. I can only conclude that these publications are either new-technology-phobics, insisting on using obsolete Word software (odd, considering the nature of Science). Or they're pushing an agenda, as indicated about comments to use "ODF". It seems strange that they'll accept ".doc" and suggest that people use older software even though ".docx" is far more open and free to use in other software. Perhaps they're trying to dissuade people from even trying Office 2007 to see that it's vastly superior to freeware alternatives and even previous versions of Office...

x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt {b^2-4ac}}{2a}

x = <em>Ctrl-F</em> -b <em>Ctrl-Shift-K, +; Ctrl-R</em> b <em>Ctrl-H</em> 2 <em>right arrow</em> - 4 a c <em>down arrow</em> 2a

I teach algebra in Orange County, CA, and have been using one of these for most of the last school year. My school has probably 85% of the classrooms equipped with these, with the remaining 15% due to get them early next year. I use a Smart Board with a 12" PowerBook and an Epson LCD projector*. It is front projection, which can be a pain (especially when my clueless 7th and 8th graders look directly into the beam), but I do enjoy using it. With the Smart Board and a PowerPoint** presentation, I can cover more information in a class period than I can by just sitting at an overhead projector. This also allows me to have the full text of what I'm saying on the screen as I'm saying it, which allows both my auditory and visual learners to acquire more of the imformation. I craft the presentations in such a way that the example problems show every step of work on each click of my wireless presentation remote/laser pointer. If I need to highlight/underline/circle/do anything by hand, there is a selection of pens at the ready, just as if I was working at a chalkboard or whiteboard. However, I find being able to walk around the room while I explain how to factor trinomials does wonders for keeping my students on task.

Does the tech make me a better teacher? No, but it does allow me to keep the attention of my 180 hormonal 7th and 8th graders on a bright and sunny June day where you can smell the ocean on the breeze. Do all of the teachers who have Smart Boards at my school make use of them? No. Some simply do not want to while others do not know how to use them or integrate them into their lessons. Here is where the system starts to show flaws. The level of training we receive on technology is almost non-existant. My school and school district could stand to do much more there.

Smart Boards and computers are excellent tools to use in education, but are not a panecea for all of education's ills. Smaller class sizes would be an excellent first step. I have between 35 and 38 students per class, which is far too many to give any kind of individualized attention to in class. 25 to 30 per class would be really nice, and being able to achieve that mythical 20:1 student to teacher ratio would be heaven. Another thing that would be of big help to the level of education we can provide would be to have elemetary teachers who are not afraid of math. So many of my 7th graders barely know their multiplication tables, much less any trace of pre-algebra skills like how to work with formulas. Heaven forbid that I throw a fraction into a problem. We're trying to fix the problem of under-performing schools by making the Jr. High and High Schools so much more advanced, but we aren't getting the foundations laid securely enough to allow that to work. Better pay would be nice, but I'd much rather see math specialists at the elementary levels and more teachers in general first. Education is the foundation of every other career. If we do not support it properly, we're going to see more and more of the other professions suffer in the near future.

* - When using my LCD projector or overhead projector, I do not have to keep my room "oppressively dark." I have mini-blinds on my south-facing bank of windows and paper covering 80% of my north-facing windows, which is sufficient to be able to see either image source. In fact, my students almost uniformly prefer the dimmed room and natural lighting opposed to the harsh flourescents flooding the room. There is a chorus of groans whenever I turn the lights back on. Supposedly, we were going to get blackout curtains last year, and to be fair, we did get the runners installed, but here it is, 9 school days left, and no curtains yet. The paper stays on the windows.

** - I only use PowerPoint because it has Equation Editor and MathType. If Apple (or a third party) has something similar for use with KeyNote, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Maybe I should submit an "Ask Slashdot" for that one...

Undoubtably MathML support is there because it is in Mozilla. Between Mozilla, Netscape, and IE (with MathPlayer), all of the major browsers will support MathML. That together with support from math programs such as Mathematica, it really looks like MathML will finally become real this year.

There's a conference on MathML at the end of June this year. Leslie Lamport (LaTeX fame) and Roger Sidje (who did the MathML support in Mozilla) are among the invited speakers.