Mathematics is an essential aspect of scientific communication and education. Therefore, to realize the potential of the Web for science, it must be possible to use mathematics on the Web. Mathematical expressions must move seamlessly between the Web and a wide range of related environments including authoring tools and content management systems, XML-based publishing work flows, e-learning environments, and scientific computing software.
To address this need, W3C brought together key players and major stake holders to devise a solution. The Math Working Group created the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), a highly-structured, information-rich, XML encoding for mathematical expressions, and is chartered to maintain it.
MathML facilitates the authoring and presentation of mathematical expressions in print and on the screen, and forms the basis for machine to machine communication of mathematics on the Web. Designed as an XML application, MathML provides two sets of tags, one for the presentation of mathematics and the other associated with the meaning behind equations. MathML is not designed for people to enter by hand; specialized tools provide the means for typing in and editing mathematical expressions.
The MathML 1.0 Recommendation first appeared on 7 April 1998. Four subsequent revisions have followed, culminating with the MathML 2.0, Second Edition on 21 October 2003. MathML 2, Second Edition is fully synchronized with Unicode 4.0. It is also fully integrated with XHTML and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and interoperates well with other W3C technologies such as XSL (the Extensible Stylesheet Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and XML Schema.
Development of the next update of MathML, called MathML 3.0, started in 2006. It will support, among other things additional notations, features for online assessment (online learning) and right-to-left formulas (in particular for Arabic).
The Math Working Group has been working on several drafts besides MathML 3.0, including a subset of MathML that can be rendered on any browser that supports CSS, a MathML Primer and an alternative syntax that might be used for entering MathML in wikis.
The Math Working Group works together with the CSS Working Group, the CDF Working Group and the HTML Working Group on a common framework for compound documents that supports typographically correct mathematics.
The Math Working Group publishes a roadmap, a live document with the status of the various deliverables.
The group is writing an informative MathML Primer and is cooperating with the OpenMath community to integrate the OpenMath Content Dictionaries into MathML (replacing the old dictionaries in MathML 2).
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Math Working Group (participants) | Patrick D F Ion, Robert Miner | Bert Bos | Chartered until 31 July 2008 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for the April 2008 W3C Advisory Committee Meeting (Members only) per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Bert Bos, Math Activity Lead
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