math in text/html both legal and practical

Dear Friends --

Ten years ago there was a somewhat heated discussion here about
whether it should be "legal" to put MathML in text/html offerings and
whether, if one did, Mozilla would handle it.  At that time, as I
recall, the MathPlayer folk wanted to have MathML in text/html, Amaya
was handling MathML both in text/html and in xml (before the arrival
of application/xhtml+xml), while Mozilla was handling MathML only in
xml.

It seems that last month with (1) the first non-beta release of
Firefox 4 and (2) the 1.1 release of MathJax, we have for the first
time all of the "big 4" browsers, current versions, supporting math in
text/html (under the mantle of html5).

I guess everyone by now knows that MathJax, in addition to allowing
authors to use pseduo-TeX in html source, provides a tool for
rendering MathML in browsers not supporting MathML natively without
the need for any special attention, not even font acquisition, by the
user.

And it's relatively simple to spin the text/html serialization of
html5 from old application/xhtml+xml pages with math.

I'm pleased.

                                    -- Bill

Received on Monday, 25 April 2011 21:47:19 UTC