WebMath: IE and MathML

[Robert Miner]

Hi.

> But can anyone on the list comment on what's been happening with IE
> and MathML lately? (Robert? :o) )

There is some progress.  Internet Explorer 5 introduced something
called Behaviors that in essence allow a developer to "bind" some
executable code to a particular XML element.  In our latest release of
WebEQ, we have used Behaviors to attach the WebEQ Math Viewer to the
<math> element.  

The net effect is that once a reader has installed the Math Viewer in
IE5, by putting a couple of lines of style and script code at the top
of your file, straight MathML markup in the page will be automatically
rendered in the client browser with WebEQ.  This has the very positive
effect that the same document will render properly in both the new
Mozilla browser, and in IE5.

The down side is that there are still a couple of technical problems
with IE5 behaviors, and on top of that, because of Java flakiness,
WebEQ bogs down badly if there are more than a couple dozen equations
in a page.  When I approached Dave Massey (the contact person for
MathML on the IE team at Microsoft) about these problems, he was very
responsive, and it looks like behaviors will be very much improved in
the 5.5 release of Internet Explorer, and in particular, they will be
nicely set up for native binary behaviors as opposed to
Java/JavaScript behaviors that have performance limitations.

Beyond that, however, there isn't much definite I can say.  Obviously
a bunch of people and/or companies are looking into writing software
to take advantage of the new behaviors.  But so far, no one is making
any public commitments...

--Robert

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Robert Miner                          http://www.webeq.com
Geometry Technologies, Inc.           email: rminer at geomtech.com
                                      phone: 651-223-2884
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