WebMath: MathML conf. report

[June Lester]

Folks -

I'm just back from the MathML conference (abstracts/papers at
<http://www.mathmlconference.org/2002/presentations.html>).  Overall
impressions (from my non-techie end user's viewpoint): mixed.  More
technical than the 2000 conference and less end-user oriented (both
presentations and participants).  Some interesting tools, most notably
Wolfram's WebMathematica server
<http://www.wolfram.com/products/webmathematica/>. Some indications that
MathML may be becoming more an academic research area and less a
technical/applied one. The most interesting presentation (from my
design-focussed point of view): Robert Miner's A Dynamic Math Object Model
<http://www.mathmlconference.org/2002/presentations/miner/>, exploring 
what we actually want to *do* with intractive online math text once we have
it.  (A participant comment: "Robert is one of the few people who actually
*get* it".)

The claim that "MathML is here" is a bit premature.  It's here in that the
major browsers will display it (natively in Netscape and Mozilla, with help
from Design Science's MathPlayer
<http://www.mathtype.com/webmath/mathplayer/ > in IE), but authors must
link to a "universal stylesheet"
<http://www.mathmlconference.org/2002/presentations/carlisle/ > to detect
browser/platform and provide the appropriate individual markup.  Most of
this is pretty recent; expect bugs and fiddle time. If you want Mac users
to be able to read your stuff, you're still out of luck: the style sheet
doesn't include Mac browsers and there didn't appear to be much interest
from those involved in *making* it include Mac browsers.  (I asked.
However, rumour has it that Mac-friendly Wolfram <http://www.wolfram.com/ >
may take on the task. Also, there's now an early third-party Mac version of
the W3C browser Amaya <http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/amaya>,
which displays MathML and allows editing.)  The moral? If you need MathML
badly enough and/or want to get a head start (e.g. for major online
publishing or education initiatives), accept that there'll inevitably be a
lot of tweaking to do and go for it.  If you're a non-techie individual
looking to put up a few pages for students or something similar, stick with
PDF or other simpler technologies for a bit until stability and authoring
are no longer issues.  IMHO.

Cheers

June


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