Within the life of a student in, say electricity, our student might be doing some statistics in trying to differentiate, for example, normal and gamma distribution.

Well, how can a student learn this?

Of course, with a textbook and, of course, on the web.

On the web, our textbook might offer some editing function, some exercises function, and one of the normal things that you want to do is to verify some integrals.

You can compute these integrals.

They're not too easy to compute, or you can ask a machine to compute.

For this, what would a normal person do?

Select, copy, and go to a computing engine.

One of the computing engine is on the web.

It's called Wolfram Alpha.

You can paste, hmm, monster.

But, who cares?

Just try it.

Ah, Too bad.

You can't actually compute that thing.

That's too bad because, actually our student has done some other experiences and it actually pastes not too bad within Word.

So, things have been understood.

So, maybe the question is can copy and paste a formula really work?

Well, let's try to explore.

If our student would be a little bit techy oriented our student might be trying to look at the clipboard from insight.

We'll do that by copying again.

Copy.

And then we'll go to the clipboard viewer.

What do we have?

Just plain text.

So, actually Word was doing content sniffing.

It just saw the plain text and saw that, well, this is math.

So, probably it should interpret it as MathML.

We all know that content sniffing is not necessarily a good idea.

Well, but you can try other tools.

And you can also try to copy from Word and from Word you would you would be surprised to see many different behavior.

So, let's try to bring this thing in.

This is copy and paste, right?

You can always do this.

You copy from here.

And then you go, for example, to Mathematica, which is a desktop… a desktop computing function.

Not too bad!

The integral has been understood.

So, what's inside the clipboard?

Well, a lot more.

What's inside the Clipboard is something that the math work group has specified sometimes, MathML and MathML presentation.

These are the things that, um, Word, the equation editor Word, can edit.

You have all sorts of things, including math, HTML and so on.

So, there is a possibility of transmitting based on some standard.

Let's travel a few pages.

For example, we could be trying a random page with MathML.

That's one article, some times ago that was published to archive.

And that page you could use to copy Paste some formulae.

Why not?

Well, it might work or it might not work.

We can try that.

Maybe that's too easy?

We can try this one.

And we go there, we go to Word, we try to paste.

Hmm.

This seems a bit more wild.

And what's in our clipboard?

Well, it's just HTML.

Probably the MathML is in there, but it's mixed up with so many things that Word couldn't make sense of it.

Let's try maybe a Wikipedia page, because many people are using Wikipedia and our student might be doing this as well.

We can, here, select a little formula, this density function and try to paste it, I don't know, in Mathematica?

Plain text is coming in.

What about Word?

I can delete everything.

Word pastes nothing.

Well, so there are definitely interoperability problems here and that's what we would like to solve.

What we would say is the web needs differentiated MathML formats.

I think we had a good example between Word and Mathematica.

Actually, there is even another guy who is developing an input editor for mathematical formulae called Arno Gourdol who said even JavaScript should be using this.

JavaScript should be allowing to export mathematical content MathML clipboard formats.

Why not?

Currently, it only exports some private formats.