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.