MathML in Web Pages
Dear Lazyweb,
Since this worked so well to find a great article on HTTP caching… Does anyone know of a good introductory article for how to get MathML to display in Web Pages across multiple browsers etc.
My primary recommendation unfortunately will be to convert it to an image, but I’d like to provide instructions for the folk who want to maintain accessibility for their equations as well. Related and also interesting is anything discussing mime-types, XHTML and how to solve the IE problem.
Thanks,
Faithful believer in collective intelligence…
August 20th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Depending on what this is for you may want to look at how mediawiki handles LaTeX instead. There are quite a number of components to integrate but the results look good and so does the LaTeX. Maths symbols expressed in XML must at best be verbose by comparison.
Failing that, ask your users to get a sane browser. Safari (v4-DP) seems to handle MathML stress tests well enough.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Vincent,
Good suggestions in general but not for this particular case. My aim is to write an article for Ephox’s clients who use our integrated (WYSIWYG) equation editor, which generates MathML so LaTeX isn’t an option. Our clients then publish these equations in all kinds of different places so there’s not really any controlling the browser, plus it appears that browsers that do have MathML support only render it in XHTML documents served with the correct mime type. This of course leads to problems with IE…
Hence, a good article that explains all this would save me an awful lot of time researching and experimenting to discover exactly how each browser works and then finding a way to express that in plain English. I guess if such an article doesn’t exist I’ll have to attempt to write it…
August 20th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Hi,
Design Science (my company) has instructions on how to publish MathML pages for maximal browser compatibility. We also make MathPlayer which is a free downloadable plugin for IE that allows it to display MathML. This is also the best route to accessibility as it works with the major screen readers to turn MathML into speech. Visit http://www.dessci.com/mathplayer.
Paul
August 20th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Hi Adrian,
We’ve posted a reference article about creating web pages with MathML (mostly by using Design Science software, of course, but you may find some other helpful information there): http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer/author/creatingpages.htm#InteroperabilityConsiderations
In most cases, if you are serving a simple web page, all you need is a .xht or .xhtml extension on your document for the MathML to render correctly in Mozilla/Firefox and IE+MathPlayer, but in limited cases (as mentioned in the article) this is not enough, which is why some people choose to use the Universal Math Stylesheets or a combination of MathML and images. If you would like to discuss this in further detail, please do not hesitate to contact me at Design Science.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:37 am
We have an article on our website titled “Creating MathML Web Sites”. Perhaps this will be useful. There’s plenty of other information on our site about MathML, but this article is a good place to start.
http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer/author/creatingsites.htm
August 20th, 2008 at 6:01 am
You know, normally I’m impressed by one person from a company monitoring blogs and contributing to the conversation - three from Design Science is really very impressive. I’m honestly not sure why I didn’t just go straight to your site actually. For those who don’t know, the integrated equation editor I mention above is in fact a very slightly modified (really just to make it fit into an applet) version of Design Science’s WebEQ. Personally I think it’s just a bunch of squiggly bits but our clients love it and since they can actually remember what all those squiggly bits mean I tend to believe them. :)
These articles are precisely what I had in mind - I guess my task is reduced to simply pointing to them. Thanks.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I should point out one subtlety with getting MathPlayer to work with your pages. IE7 is VERY finicky about the HTTP Content-Type header. You must *not* set a charset parameter on it. Most Webservers do this by default, and many Web frameworks (I’ve been serving MathML papges using Rails) do as well. See
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001768.html
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/instiki/show/HomePage