W3C Math Home

News

2010-02-11: “XML Entity Definitions for Characters” submitted for final review

The specification XML Entity Definitions for Characters has advanced to the status of Proposed Recommendation, the final step before becoming a standard. It contains names for many mathematical and other symbols, all from the Unicode standard, and thus allows those symbols to be written into XML documents in environments where typing them directly would be difficult or impossible. The specification is used by several types of documents, such as HTML5, DocBook, and, of course, MathML. W3C members have until March 11, 2010, to review the document. The specification should become a W3C Recommendation three or four weeks later.

2009-12-15: MathML3 and the MathML for CSS profile are Candidate Recommendations

The W3C Director today advanced the status of MathML3 from Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation (CR). That means that W3C is now asking people to not only send comments on the text, but to implement the specification and send feedback on any problems found in actual use. The MathML for CSS profile, which describes a subset of MathML3 that can be rendered with existing CSS renderers, was advanced to CR at the same time. The next step for both specifications is PR, as soon as there are sufficiently many implementations. The working group expects to start testing implementations around March 2010. Feedback can be sent to the <www-math@w3.org> mailing list.

2009-09-24: Last Call and Working Draft of MathML 3.0

The Math Working Group published a new draft of the MathML 3.0 specification, which is intended to be the last one before the specification becomes a Candidate Recommendation, around the end of the year. That means this is the last call for comments. Please, send comments to <www-math@w3.org>. The deadline is November 11. See the status section and appendix F for an overview of the major changes.

2009-06-04: New drafts of MathML 3.0 and the MathML for CSS profile

The Math Working Group published new drafts of two specifications, Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 and A MathML for CSS profile. The new draft of MathML 3.0 especially affects chapter 4, on content mark-up, but there are smaller improvements throughout the document. The new draft profile adds some elementary math (e.g., long division) and includes sample CSS rules for displaying elementary math formulas. See the drafts for the details and for how to give feedback.

2008-11-17: New draft of MathML 3.0

The Math Working Group published the fourth draft of MathML version 3. Some more of the non-normative text has been removed in favor of a separate Primer. The presentation mark-up now allows the author to insert rendering hints in case the renderer has to insert extra line breaks. But most of the editorial effort has gone into defining the underlying semantics of content mark-up (chapter 4): it is now almost completely expressed in terms of OpenMath Content Dictionaries. That should not affect authors, but it enables software to convert between different math systems. Chapter 8 will eventually describe the structure of those Content Dictionaries. Comments on the draft are very welcome on the group's (archived) public mailing list, <www-math@w3.org>. There will be at least one more draft before the specification becomes Candidate Recommendation.

2008-11-07: W3C extends Math Working Group for 18 months

The charter of the Math Working Group expired earlier this year, and, after a few months' extension to determine the contents of the next charter, W3C decided to renew the charter until April 2010 without any changes to the work items. The updated schedule puts a Candidate Recommendation for MathML 3.0 at the end of 2008 and the group currently expects it can finish all its work, including all test suites, in early 2010. W3C Members can use a form to join the Working Group.

2008-07-21: New draft of “XML Entity definitions for Characters”

The Math Working Group published a new version of the draft XML Entity definitions for Characters. The specification defines names for many Unicode symbols. The names can be used in MathML if the use of the symbols themselves is inconvenient or impossible. The list of names is a superset of the list defined by HTML. The specification includes DTDs to include the names in other XML-based formats and also XSLT2 scripts to convert symbols to names.

2008-05-27: Mathematical User-Interfaces Workshop 2008

The organizers of the Mathematical User-Interfaces Workshop 2008 call for papers. The workshop takes place at the Seventh Mathematical Knowledge Management Conference, at the University of Birmingham, UK, July 27th 2008. The coordinator is Paul Libbrecht. Papers can be submitted until May 31, 2008.

2008-05-27: Planet MathML news aggregator

The Math Working Group has set up a syndicator for MathML-related news, called “Planet MathML.” It includes news about Math software, news from the Math WG itself (of course), blog entries written by working group members, and articles from the <www-math@w3.org> mailing list and elsewhere.

2008-04-09: New draft of MathML 3

The Math Working group published a new draft of MathML 3. Especially chapter 4, Content Markup, has improved, and the content dictionaries (section 4.4) are aligned with OpenMath3. Some other material has been removed and will reappear later in a separate primer.