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# A MathML Progress Report: More Light Than Shadow

#### timothy posted about 9 months ago | from the show-all-work dept.

84

An anonymous reader writes "Recent reports of MathML's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Given the amount of marketing dollars companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have spent trying to convince a buying public to purchase their wares as educational tools, you'd think they'd deliver more than lip service by now. MathJax team member, Peter Krautzberger, has compiled a great overview of the current state of MathML, the standard for mathematical content in publishing work flows, technical writing, and math software: "20 years into the web, math and science are still second class citizens on the web. While MathML is part of HTML 5, its adoption has seen ups and downs but if you look closely you can see there is more light than shadow and a great opportunity to revolutionize educational, scientific and technical communication.""

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### HipHop Killed the Video Star (-1)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45309031)

Ain't that the truff!

*ducks*

### Math? (0)

#### kko (472548) | about 9 months ago | (#45309159)

Nobody likes math. Serves them nerds right!

### MathML is horrible (3, Insightful)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45309181)

Have you ever tried to write anything in it?

It doesn't flow for shit. Compare that to (La)TeX, where it flows not completely naturally, but it makes sense and actually writes in the order it will be, and mostly the order it's said when you say it.

All the visual equation editors I have seen, including MathML editors, are utter crap. There's a reason why even Wikipedia uses it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula [wikipedia.org] .

### Re:MathML is horrible (2)

#### AliasMarlowe (1042386) | about 9 months ago | (#45309669)

It doesn't flow for shit. Compare that to (La)TeX, where it flows not completely naturally, but it makes sense and actually writes in the order it will be, and mostly the order it's said when you say it.

And tools like tex4ht [tug.org] make translation of LaTeX to html a breeze. You get the best of both worlds, with nice LaTeX documents (from which Postscript or dvi or PDF etc. can also be made) translated to html. It will even generate jsMath [union.edu] if you want.

### Re:MathML is horrible (2)

#### jensend (71114) | about 9 months ago | (#45311979)

HTML and XML in general are horrible too if you're writing anything remotely complex by hand. But we use these kinds of formats because they are expressively powerful, unambiguous to a parser, and amenable to various kinds of analysis and transformations.

If you want to write docs yourself, rather than writing everything in HTML/XML + CSS it makes sense to write in another syntax and convert it, especially if you're doing regular everyday things; this is what Markdown, wiki syntax, etc are about. Similarly, you wouldn't write MathML by hand in most cases; you can use a simple syntax like AsciiMathML [chapman.edu] or some non-Turing-complete subset of (La)TeX for writing most regular everyday stuff and convert it.

### Re:MathML is horrible (1)

#### RobertJ1729 (2640799) | about 9 months ago | (#45313103)

That's because you don't know what it's for. MathML is what you get when you try to do translate the expressiveness of LaTeX into the domain of HTML/XML. You should ask yourself why it is that the very same people who work on a tool that you this is good, namely LaTeX, are the people who developed MathML, which you think is bad. If you are writing MathML by hand, you are doing it wrong.

### Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (2)

#### Animats (122034) | about 9 months ago | (#45309183)

Mozilla's PDF renderer has trouble with larger math symbols [mozilla.org] , like sigmas and integrals.

Typical open source bug handling - reported in May 2013, somebody whines that that the test case for the bug is too big, someone else provides more details, bug is marked as confirmed, somebody tries it on OS-X, where it works, someone else demonstrates the failure with a small test case, posts screenshots, and shows that the PDF works on Linux Firefox but not Windows Firefox. After six months, zero progress on fixing it.

### Re:Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (5, Funny)

#### Behrooz Amoozad (2831361) | about 9 months ago | (#45309267)

The way I see it:

Does it run on linux? yes

So, What is your problem?

### Re:Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (4, Insightful)

#### dkf (304284) | about 9 months ago | (#45309715)

After six months, zero progress on fixing it.

As usual, you've got to find someone who develops for Windows and is sufficiently interested to work on the bug. As it is a rendering problem, working on another platform and cross-compiling won't work, and the Windows API is sufficiently different to make it much easier to be a specialist rather than a cross-platform guy. I'd guess that if someone were willing to commit some money (some sort of targeted bug bounty) to pay for the fix, it would get done sooner.

It's not magic. (Or rather it is, but we're all the magicians.)

### Re:Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (0)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45309799)

"It's not magic. (Or rather it is, but we're all the magicians.)"

Then what do you need money for? Just conjure up what you need.

### Re:Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (1)

#### gl4ss (559668) | about 9 months ago | (#45309973)

mozillas moneyflow says that it's some sort of magic ;).. magic of moolah.

### Re:Mozilla can't even do math in PDF (2)

#### serviscope_minor (664417) | about 9 months ago | (#45310069)

Typical open source bug handling - whinging

You're taking a dig at open source, but the only thing to compare it to is closed source. Let me quote some more of your comment:

somebody tries it on OS-X, where it works, someone else demonstrates the failure

You mean somebody actually did something? This is so far ahead of most typical closed source bug reporting which is usually drawn from one of these options:

1. *tumbleweed*

2. Oh yeah, it is a bug. Wait for the next version.

### Re:LaTex plugin (1)

#### lucag (24231) | about 9 months ago | (#45310639)

For a human?
Absolutely nothing: I actually sort of like the example, even if you would need at least

\catcode/=0 /def/implies{/Leftrightarrow}

somewhere in your file for the "/implies" to work ;))
This is exactly one of the problems I was pointing out: too much flexibility is not so good in this case.

For a computer?
Well, a computer can do a good job to print that out, also; as I said, mathjax does render such an expression (provided you do not use external macros, etc. etc.) within a
web page. Actually this is what I use on my web page when I put online the abstract of a paper; Sciencedirect (a service by Elsevier) also makes full texts of papers available using the same trick. Yet, it is fairly clear that this looks more like a stopgap measure than a solution for the problem: the standard for mathematics on the web should not be designed for humans, but rather for ease of parsing and processing (within a DOM) by machines, with "sort of" standard techniques and tools.

### Re:LaTex plugin (0)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45311353)

Most of the time when people say they just want a latex tag, they don't mean the entire type setting part of the language, but a subset as it pertains to writing out math. There are quite a few examples around, besides just web related ones like the example you give, and it usually just comes down to figuring out exactly what subset each program is using. If it was properly integrated with other parts of HTML like documents, then you wouldn't need all of the stuff for making commutative diagrams, as you could generate that with SVG and just stick the latex inside the SVG text boxes.

The largest gray areas would come from when you want to exploit the latex positioning code within an equation (instead of for positioning the whole thing), like some of the tricks used to superimpose two symbols or oddly position them to get some more obscure notations. Or if for some reason you wanted to stick a non-latex html or svg, or whatever thing in the middle of your equation. The majority of these problem cases could probably be solved by just some thought put into a way to define new symbols within the latex tag. It might not be compact, but there will always be more extreme examples that can't be compactly expressed in in a markup. The question is how compact are the most common things going to be, and not to get stuck with something that abbreviates less common things by inflating stuff you proportionally use a lot more often.

### Re:LaTex plugin (0)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45310205)

The problem is the GUI. Very few people care to publish their formatted math equations by writing display code, anymore than people care to debone their own chickens to make soup. The only decent GUI for LaTeX is called "LyX", and it's fairly good, but not designed for web content management. So you get weirder stuff where people can just pull-down, click on this, shift that around, and voila! Legible, though not elegantly presented, equations.

The poor quality of the GUI's is an archetype of what Eric Raymond discussed in his 10 year old essay at http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html, titled "The Luxury of Ignorance".

### Re:LaTex plugin (1)

#### lucag (24231) | about 9 months ago | (#45310681)

Not really; if you are a professional mathematician, then you almost definitely have a good and fluent command of latex; as such the issue of a GUI is hardly relevant (and it feels "natural" to write equations in a certain way)

If on the other hand you just want to write some formulas on your web page, then I concur that latex might be the wrong technology and it is also a technology which is not so easy to integrate with GUI tools as soon as what you want to do is non-trivial (speaking of which I would like to point out that most CAS support a form or another of tex output for their results; the code they produce is "interesting", to say the least and I always find more convenient to retype the formula than to copy and paste what is needed).

### Re: LaTex plugin (0)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45312035)

LyX is terrific. Great editor all around.

What is this about no LaTeX color equations? LyX did them fine...

### Re:LaTex plugin (1)

#### loufoque (1400831) | about 9 months ago | (#45310347)

LaTeX may look good, but it's old and inelegant technology.
The real ironic part is that TeX was written by a guy who contributed a lot to the field of programming languages, grammars and parsing, but its grammar is horrible.

oblig [xkcd.com]

### Re:LaTex plugin (1)

#### lucag (24231) | about 9 months ago | (#45310733)

Acttually LaTeX has not been written by Donald Knuth, but it is a macro language built upon TeX by Leslie Lamport (which is also a very remarkable computer scientist, but I suppose he is not who you were thinking about).
Yes, the grammar is horrible, but once the basics of the language are mastered it feels quite a natural setting where to write text; if you want to implement a program in it, on the other hand, things are not so "easy". Look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2968411/ive-heard-that-latex-is-turing-complete-are-there-any-programs-written-in-late [stackoverflow.com]
This being said, the people at http://www.luatex.org/ [luatex.org] are doing a really good job to integrate the engine of tex with lua and exposing its internals, as to offer a "reasonable" programming language both for tuning the typesetting and for actually implementing algorithms within the documents.

### Re: LaTex plugin (1)

#### loufoque (1400831) | about 9 months ago | (#45312783)

Maybe you should read the comments you reply to. I clearly said Knuth invented TeX, not LaTeX.

### Re:LaTex plugin (0)

#### Anonymous Coward | about 9 months ago | (#45313207)

"LaTeX may look good, but it's old and inelegant technology."

So is UNIX. We're still using it, with gusto!

### Only smells funny? (1)

#### klapaucjusz (1167407) | about 9 months ago | (#45310511)

We've been waiting for math rendering support in HTML for slightly over 15 years (MathML came out in 1998, and there was HTML 3 math before that).

We've given up. Both the scientific and the higher education communities are using PDF almost exclusively, and our respective userbases (fellow scientists and students) have accepted PDF as the format of choice. At the same time, PDF support in browsers and on tablets has become good enough to make that a reasonable proposition.

But yeah, let's write blog postings about why MathML is not dead, it only smells funny.

### Re:Only smells funny? (1)

#### lachlan76 (770870) | about 9 months ago | (#45314759)

Things are changing a little bit. Elsevier offer HTML+MathJax at least for the journals that I've used. MathJax (a JS library) makes things quite a bit easier in that you can use LaTeX and have it automatically rendered to MathML, picking up \begin{align}\end{align}s and such in your HTML.

### JSON (1)

#### Ukab the Great (87152) | about 9 months ago | (#45310907)

I guess someone will have to invent a MathJSON to make MathML acceptable for the hipsters.

### A lot of misunderstanding in this thread. (5, Interesting)

#### RobertJ1729 (2640799) | about 9 months ago | (#45313303)

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about what MathML is for. What we are wanting, what we need, is for modern browsers to support the rendering of mathematics. To even get off the ground, we need a markup language for the browser to interpret. Since browsers already know how to speak XML, it only makes sense for the markup to be some flavor of XML. Those who are suggesting LaTeX instead are really missing the point here. We aren't solve the problem of a lack of human writable markup. That problem has been solved many times over. The problem we are trying to solve is rendering mathematics in the browser. Period. THAT is what we need MathML support for.

Again, the problem is NOT a problem of AUTHORSHIP. Authorship is easy. It's a problem of DISPLAY. And it is a serious and important problem to be solved. The web was invented to share scientific information. Education on the web is huge--and growing. Academic publishers, mathematical software, and software shims that display math in a browser all use MathML extensively. It's a ubiquitous technology precisely because it fills a need in the industry, and it fills it well. What's more, MathML is important for an accessible web.

PDF is clearly not good enough for digital consumption. PDF is great for print but totally sucks for screens. MathJax is amazing (as are the people behind it), but it is a huge, complicated, and inefficient solution to the problem of math in the browser. The author of the linked article in the submission works on MathJax professionally and is advocating MathML support in the browser. That should tell you something. (In fact, MathJax itself uses MathML both internally and as an input/output format.)

### Re:A lot of misunderstanding in this thread. (1)

#### quax (19371) | about 9 months ago | (#45315999)

Wished I had mod points to give you. This is exactly the issue at hand, and the confusion on display in this thread is very discouraging.

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