| MathType White Papers
White papers are short somewhat technical documents that express Design
Science's position on a technology.
Mathematics
on the Web: MathML and MathType
Abstract
Currently, there is no effective way of expressing standard mathematical
notation in Web pages. Equations can be displayed as GIF images but printing
is poor, pages can download slowly, and they don't adapt to the browser
user's font choices.
MathML is a proposed solution to the problem. It is based on XML (Extensible
Markup Language), a proposed standard by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
as a successor to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the language of the
Web. MathML can be used to express both the presentation of mathematics
and its meaning (through high school level mathematics). MathML is human-readable
but not designed to be written by humans but by software.
MathType 4.0 is able to generate MathML for use in authoring Web pages
with mathematics. It will do so via a new translator mechanism. Translators
are defined using a simple language and may be customized by the end user.
A MathML translator definition file comes with MathType 4.0 that will
produce MathML presentation tags.
With support for XML/MathML by the major browser vendors and authoring
tool suppliers, MathML will be a good mechanism for bringing mathematics
to the Web.
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