Re: math in text/html both legal and practical

HTML5's support of MathML is a big deal although IE9 finally supports
XHTML.  As someone who has bemoaned the problems of incompatibilities in the
implementation of MathML in browsers for years, I find is ironic that IE
finally added XHTML support just as the need for it goes away.  I don't
think anyone would question my assertion that HTML5 will come to dominate
how MathML is delivered in the future.

FYI:  We will be releasing a public beta of MathPlayer 3 in a few weeks that
works with IE9 and HTML5.  We're still working out some last minute issues
that have come up with trying to work around problems in IE9's lack of
support for MathML.  It will also work a little better with MathJax.

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, Equation Editor ~



On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 2:46 PM, William F Hammond
<hammond@csc.albany.edu>wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>
>