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Interop and MathML Core

37 points • by todsacerdoti • last Sunday at 5:02 PM • 3 comments • view on HN

Comments

chriswarbo • today at 1:37 PM

Very nice! One thing I've found useful about MathML is that, since it's XML, it's easy to generate (e.g. from scripts) and transform (e.g. with XSLT).

My preferred workflow at the moment is to programatically-generate "Content MathML", which lets me focus on the structure of things (akin to Lisp's prefix-form s-expressions), e.g. here's "applying plus to identifier x and identifier y":

    <apply>
      <csymbol definitionURL="https://openmath.org/cd/arith1#plus">plus</csymbol>
      <ci>x</ci>
      <ci>y</ci>
    </apply>
Browsers can't display Content MathML, so I use XSLT (adapted from [1]) to convert it to "Presentation MathML". The "MathML Core" discussed in this article is a subset of Presentation MathML. Presentation MathML focuses on the layout of symbols, e.g. the above becomes "identifier x followed by operator + followed by identifier y":

    <mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>+</mo><mi>y</mi></mrow>
This separation also lets me choose different notations, without having to alter the underlying data; e.g. on this page which compares two different notations http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/units/negative_bar_notati... (if you click the "View Source" link at the bottom, you'll see the same data being piped into `math block` and `math block minus`, which just apply a different stylesheet).

[1] https://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/Overview-tech.html

bArray • today at 4:20 PM

I get the feeling that MathML will win out, simply because Firefox supported from early on [1], there is first move advantage. I use an old JS library for backwards compatibility [2] that adds just enough support for any math I'm math'in [3]. I would still prefer SVG, but it ended up being a pain to implement reliably.

One thing I noticed about this site though is that it is laggy - and I have a pretty good system.

[1] https://caniuse.com/mathml

[2] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/mathml-render.html

[3] https://github.com/pshihn/math-ml

Tpt • today at 11:24 AM

It's amazing to see MathML moving forward. As a european, I really like this usage of my taxes euros.