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MathML 2.0 Becomes W3C Proposed Recommendation
Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page.
Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.
I cannot but be pleased with this innovation; it enables the creation on the Web of a perfect logical notation to resemble my "Begriffsschrift", or "concept-script". This shall allow for the statement of propositions such that their grammatical form models their logical form, and as such is a development of the highest importance.
(p)(p v p)
Mozilla (since M18 at least) supports MathML out of the box. I'm sure the support isn't 100% complete or bug-free, but looking at a couple of demonstration pages it can do some pretty impressive stuff.
:)
It supports only the "presentational" markup, not the "semantic" form, so unless you are amazingly patient you probably need a tool to generate it (there is a TeX to MathML converter available already) and you have to use XHTML in your web pages because XML-in-HTML is not supported by Mozilla. It also isn't included in all builds, and Netscape didn't choose to build it in NS6.
All that said, it works! I can view MathML pages today in my usual browser
Stuart.
Scientists, mathemeticians, doctors, and STUDENTS!!!
I'm only a little out of school, and I remember how math was one of the bottlenecks in my studies. For most of high-school, a good calculator, $50 - $100, was all I needed to breeze through Algebra. The simple interface and display was enough to do most problems, except for geometry. Computer tools really did help me understand concepts and check my work.
Calculus changed that. You feel like you need a quill pen just for the notation, and it feels like you are hacking your own tools to do simple problems. It doesn't get better as you go on, with more complex subjects adding more notation. And I thought only classical students needed to learn Greek.
I'm not saying this will change the way we teach the natural sciences and engineering, but it will facilitate a new generation of computer-based tools, the same way a graphing calculator was a leap over the basic scientific calculator.
Now we are closer to an age where the textbook, the notebook, the scratch paper, the homework assignment, the completed homework, the exam, and the calculator all have the same interface, and the student doesn't have to constantly translate between the media.
Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.
:-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????
I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.
If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.
This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.
Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy
clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
(and)
The other problem with doing equations as bitmaps is that it breaks the functionality of the web. Visually impaired people can make the font bigger, but the equations will stay small. You can't search through it. You can't do text-to-speech. You can't change your stylesheet and have all the equations change style as well.
As far as LaTeX,
- it's never going to be learned by more than 0.01% of the world's population,
- it represents a 1970's-style approach to making a user interface (ooh, you mean I get my own terminal instead of having to hand someone a stack of punched cards?), and
- its aggressive stance on separating form from content means that you have to jump through hoops to make a complicated layout turn out how you want it.
I can understand why math and physics journals encourage submissions in LaTeX, because they want to take away the authors' freedom to format their paper according to their own preferences. But it's just not appropriate for many other situations.The Assayer - free-information book reviews
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...because of the many legacy documents in TeX, and because of the large authoring community versed in TeX, a priority in the design of MathML was the ability to convert TEX mathematics input into MathML format.
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Not Quite
It is getting close though, and with plugins and authoring support already coming from the major graphics application vendors, promises to have a chance of being used in the mainstream.
Combine SVG with a DOM and scripting support (the obvious being Java^H^H^H^HECMAScript) and you have the beginning of an open standard Flash killer.
Bleh!
The M18 milestone of Mozilla has binaries with the MathML support compiled in, so you might like to give that a try. If you feel a little more adventurous, here are some pages with more recent binaries with MathML support - Linux and Win32. These also have SVG support compiled in as well for vector images and the Linux binaries have XSL as well.
For more general information, take a look at the Mozilla MathML page.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
i would agree. after you get over the initial hump TeX (or rather LaTeX) is really easy. i would say that I think LaTeX's shortcoming is lack of advertisement. People simply just dont know about it. It's a shame really.
$\frac{1}{x}$ to write 1/x
is pretty easy, i'll have to check out the math ml and see what it's like. or i'll probably just write everything in LaTeX and use tex2html which has pretty nice output.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
And 3 or 4 years down the road some butthole company will announce they have a patent on it and start trying to extract royalties from the community. Worked for Unisys...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The W3C lives in a fantasy world where we all have good WYSIWYG tools for doing all of our HTML design. Complexity doesn't matter, as the tools handle it all for us. Unfortunately, at the current state of the art, the good tools suck and the bad tools (which everybody seems to use) produce HTML of Lovecraftian horror. We're gonna be doing it (or at least cleaning it up) by hand for a long time, folks.
MathML is another one of those things that tries to be all things to all people, all at the same time. Result is yet another markup language trying to be a page description language.
As a counter suggestion, how about something based on the old eqn preprocessor for troff? Simple and easy to understand, and far more in the "content, not format" spirit than MathML. Brian Kernighan was supposedly working on something like this. Any news?
--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
If Opera or iCab ever support it, that would probably finally motivate me to dump NS 4.72. But I'm sorry, I just refuse to downgrade to the latest NS/Mozilla/IE. Every browser is just bigger, slower, and more buggy than the last. What I really want is NS 4.73 -- you know, the bug-release version of NS 4.72 that would never crash, and would fix bugs like incorrect rendering of stylesheets.
I think we're looking at a really long delay -- maybe 10 years -- before anyone can really start writing MathML into their pages with any confidence that the typical user will have a browser that displays it correctly. Look at Java 1.1. It's been years since 1.1 came out, and I still have to have a warning at the top of my 1.1 applet's page explaining that it won't work with the NS+MacOS combination.
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Finally, a way to teach terrorists about fission with web pages that make everything look correct! This is truly a great thing, praise the green bug god for this. Now to have my minions can study mathematics and chemistry as i force them to slave away scraping watch hands so that I can collect enough fissionable material!
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
..until Microsoft releases an "Active Math" extention for this?
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
While I'm certain that this is a major boon for scientists, mathemeticians, and even doctors, I would much rather have seen a W3C Reccomendation for a non proprietary vector graphic format.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Should be shot... isn't there some sort of w3 recommendation against using fonts like that???
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Certainly, (La)TeX is better, easier, more widely known among mathematicians and scientists ... now. But when you can be sure that every desktop with a browser on it can render MathML, but less than 1% of them will have TeX, which will be taught? Which will be supported and used. Some of us will continue to use TeX until the alternatives are clearly superior. Unfortunately, many people will sacrifice some of the things that TeX does so well that aren't obvious for ubiquity. I can count on TeX to fill my paragraphs beautifully. Browsers don't always get it right.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Brett
The standard proposes to do lots, including:
Facilitate conversion to and from other mathematical formats, both presentational and semantic. Output formats should include
Anything which will allow input and output into Mathematica and TeX both (let alone the others) is going to not be something that you can not type directly by hand, so for this standard it would be unfair to expect that. Instead, it is important to make sure that the standard includes the important mathematical notions that will port from TeX and computer algebra systems. (to me, that means all of TeX and LaTeX except the page-layout specific features, and most of Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab...)
It may be that the standard is trying to do too much or that it would only be useful to the mathematical elite, but given the ambitious role it is clear that the standard will need to be complicated and presumably not suitable for unaided digestion or production.
See the standards page here, for the 12 line code for the expression for (a+b)^2.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
TeX is a Turing-complete language; this makes it difficult to do automated things to tex documents, because an innocent \foo could contain anything -- paragraph breaks, page after page of automatically generated text. This is why tools such as LaTeX2HTML still occasionally fail on documents that do fancier things than the conversion program is prepared to handle. MathML is verbose, but it's also purely declarative (at least for now), and therefore easier to process. You could create a TeX subset for math equations only -- no \def allowed -- but then it's not TeX any more.
Something like this would be schweet if it became widely accepted. HTML is OK for most things, but mathematical notation and things molecular diagrams in Chemistry have to be represented with image files which can, of course, be a real pain in the ass.
Our little college is looking into MathML as a possible way to give online placement tests to incoming first-year students, and I found that it required special browser plug-ins to work. So I'm guessing that a browsers like Opera, kfm, and my grandmother's TV internet appliance are just out of luck. Needless to say, I'm not very comfortable with depending on browser plug-ins for anything.
How soon is it going to be before browsers support this stuff out-of-the-box, without me having to download and install a stupid plug-in?
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Stephen C. VanDahm
Well, I'd still prefer how TeX does it... much more compact. I am somewhat uncomfortable with using a huge number of tags for complex (extensive) formulas.
Moz.
see a Text Widget