href="http: Copy of Mail List Article by William F. Hammond William F. Hammond

Dept of Mathematics Statistics hammond Monday, August 17, 1998 href="http:Michael Hamm writes to www: Do any browsers (esp. any versions of Mozilla or MSIE) read the HTML3 MATH tag and the tags that go in it In a single word, the answer is no HTML 3.0 was a href="http:1994 W3C draft that never got beyond draft stage and was quickly superseded by href="http:HTML 3.2 and, later, href="http:HTML 4, which contain no provision for mathematics or, better, ; but that does not really give mathematics fully reasonable access to the web.) Subsequent to the demise of mathW3C formed an HTML Math Working Group whose work led to the creation of MathML, which is now a href="http:W3C recommendation with principal rendering implementations available currently through (1) href="http:WebEq applets under mass market browsers, (2) the W3C testbed browser (and pointhref="http:Amaya, and maybe (I am not up to date) href="http:IBM's TechExplorerrelevant source code of href="http:Mozilla, the public version of href="http:NetScape, is available now, too While I understand and accept the reason for the exclusion of the HTML 3.0 math tags from HTML, we have been left with a situation that still presents a serious barrier to the efficient flow of (unstyled) content For mathematics on the web, there is a sense in which one can say that there has been very little progress in the last 5 years since it became possible to have network browsing tools, both under http and gopher, quickly spawn external applications based on mimetype It is unclear how much improvement will arise as things evolve from the dawn of MathMLMathML will serve the needs of the mathematical, scientific, and engineering communities, while still permitting the loss of much of what we understand as content from many resources on the web when that content is mathematical in natureMathML For example, I think that it could very well develop to be at least 10 years before mathematical content can be searched through major web indexing and cataloging sites in any remotely robust way, while a great deal more would be possible more cheaply if a few additional arrangements were made for dealing crudely but faithfully with mathematical content in basic HTML The arrival of the bazaar model of development in the href="http:Mozilla Project gives one hope that this will happen The early long term plan, as I have understood it, of the MathML group was to rely on the implementation in mass market browsers of the type of clienthref="http:eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and, in particular, a type of XML that might be called HTML extended by MathML (presentation tags) The idea of XML is to make up your own HTMLrendering information about these tags in a style sheet languageXML document contains a reference to the corresponding style sheet, which is also available, under a style sheet mimetype, on the webXML documentXML dream The first rendering efforts with MathML were appletMathML planning envisioned the creation of a mimetype for HTML extended by MathML and the creation of an independent rendering application (whether plugin or external) with specific knowledge of this markup languageW3C's Amaya appears to have HTML extended by MathML as its default language The tag approach to MathML probably is more sensible for the long run than HTML extended by MathML if only because MathML is so much more granular than HTMLMathML, I tend to perceive that task as not any easier than that of local direct setting of href="http: Geoffrey Tobin's DTL (printable ascii equivalent of DVI)MathML is probably too much to ask of native rendering by mass market browsers though it is certainly in scale for plugins and external apps There is still an issue in the eyes of some, on which I am neutral, of whether there is, or will be, a widely used style sheet language that is rich enough to provide the desired level of rendering of MathML presentation tags We need all of the good relevant plugins and external apps that the community has the energy to providecontent Even if one wishes to set aside the need for audio, Braille, indexing, and searching streams, envision, for example, going as a visitor to look up something on the web in the San Francisco public libraryvt100) access to the network via the browser lynx at a station that is availableyou a way to avoid waiting In windowing situations it is not too much to ask for the mathematical typewriter emulation (MTE) standard in mass market browser native rendering as part of native HTMLMTE is just emulation of the mathematical typewriter prevalent in all mathematics departments during the period 1960 MTE is more in scale with ordinary HTML than is MathML, which is much closer to fussy typesetting All that needs to be added to basic HTML is: the horde of character entities that we need (in scalable fonts with algorithmic styling for bold, emphasis, and perhaps also several forms of alternateHTML is already less beautiful than TeX rendered by "xdvi" a simple element (logical group) with attributes for horizontal and by the ascii character " and the closetag by the balancing character "lg tag could be used to change the crude rendering strings and to other ordinary string values including empty onesMathML tag from which the current lg was fabricatedMathML could be reconstructed) elements (paragraph level) and displaymath (block level) in which the new lg tag is permitted all character level things are rendered one at a time with interexcept for the case of strictly alphanumeric character level things inside lg tags containing no whitespace, which will be assumed to symbols that might be given " treatment in My understanding is that eventually the horde of characters and cursor movement will be possible with w3 in href="http:GNU Emacs under a windowing display Inasmuch as there are very few vt100 terminals extant that are not running in displays under local platform windowing systems, it is reasonable that the scientific and textvt100 terminals