"MathML will make the Web even better for educational, scientific and technical materials. It also has the potential to make mathematics accessible to those with visual disabilities. It will allow mathematical content to be reused and exchanged with technical computing systems for further manipulation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, Director W3C

Math Working Group co-chairs:

Angel Diaz, IBM aldiaz@us.ibm.com
Patrick Ion, AMS ion@ams.org

MathML FAQ page editors:

Stephen Buswell, Stilo Technology Ltd sb@stilo.com
Robert S. Sutor, IBM, sutor@us.ibm.com

Contents:

• The Goals of MathML
• MathML Syntax
• The MathML Browser Interface
• Technical MathML Issues
• The W3C Math Working Group
• MathML Tools, Products and Content
• More About MathML

MathML is verbose - I edit HTML by hand with emacs, and MathML looks tedious to read and edit in text form.
True! The verbosity of MathML is largely a consequence of the WG decision to use XML as the base syntax. The reasons for doing this include standardisation, availability of tools and the general tendency of web-based applications to use XML as a carrier format. The downside is that the encodings become verbose for examples of any complexity, with resulting requirements on tools for MathML generation and manipulation. See MathML Tools, Products and Content

Backwards compatibility - Why has MathML not reused TeX/LaTeX, or the SGML DTDs ISO 12083 or AAP Math ?
TeX and LaTeX are very widely used for encoding mathematical expressions. However, they encode only the presentation of an expression, not the underlying semantics. It has been one of the WG goals to provide a presentation mechanism with the expressive capabilities of TeX. Moreover, in addition to this it is necessary to provide mechanisms for encoding mathematical semantic content, and controlling the interface between the embedded MathML fragment and the browser processing the containing page. We also considered that it was preferable for a document with embedded mathematical formulas to require only one type of parser rather than having a completely different type of encoding for the mathematics level.

Does the verbose MathML syntax takes a long time to transfer across the net and parse?
By comparison with existing image based methods of embedding math(s) in web pages, for example GIF files, MathML is relatively quick to transfer and process.

MathML is XML-based. Will the browser manufacturers support XML fully? Will they support MathML natively ?
Yes. Both Microsoft and Netscape have publicly declared support for the XML recommendation. Some XML support is already available for IE 4. As the browser manufacturers move toward fuller support of XML and the associated style sheet standards such as XSL that are developing, support for MathML will become more "native".

Can I get a plugin or applet to render MathML ?
Yes, see MathML Tools, Products and Content

Is there a MIME type for MathML ?
The WG has discussed this but there is as yet no registered MIME type.

Can I embed APPLET, EMBED or OBJECT tags within MathML ?
MathML is defined as an XML application, so there is no special support for embedding web objects within MathML fragments. You can use APPLET and EMBED in the containing HTML page to launch an applet or plugin to render and process a MathML fragment or file.