News

2008-11-07: W3C extends Math Working Group for 18 months

The charter of the Math Working Group expired earlier this year, and, after a few months' extension to determine the contents of the next charter, W3C decided to renew the charter until April 2010 without any changes to the work items. The updated schedule puts a Candidate Recommendation for MathML 3.0 at the end of 2008 and the group currently expects it can finish all its work, including all test suites, in early 2010. W3C Members can use a form to join the Working Group.

2008-07-21: New draft of “XML Entity definitions for Characters”

The Math Working Group published a new version of the draft XML Entity definitions for Characters. The specification defines names for many Unicode symbols. The names can be used in MathML if the use of the symbols themselves is inconvenient or impossible. The list of names is a superset of the list defined by HTML. The specification includes DTDs to include the names in other XML-based formats and also XSLT2 scripts to convert symbols to names.

2008-05-27: Mathematical User-Interfaces Workshop 2008

The organizers of the Mathematical User-Interfaces Workshop 2008 call for papers. The workshop takes place at the Seventh Mathematical Knowledge Management Conference, at the University of Birmingham, UK, July 27th 2008. The coordinator is Paul Libbrecht. Papers can be submitted until May 31, 2008.

2008-05-27: Planet MathML news aggregator

The Math Working Group has set up a syndicator for MathML-related news, called “Planet MathML.” It includes news about Math software, news from the Math WG itself (of course), blog entries written by working group members, and articles from the <www-math@w3.org> mailing list and elsewhere.

2008-04-09: New draft of MathML 3

The Math Working group published a new draft of MathML 3. Especially chapter 4, Content Markup, has improved, and the content dictionaries (section 4.4) are aligned with OpenMath3. Some other material has been removed and will reappear later in a separate primer.

2008-01-18: New Working Drafts

The Math Working Group published new drafts of three specifications: A MathML for CSS profile (a profile of MathML3 that can be displayed with current CSS), MathML 3.0 and XML Entity definitions for Characters (a list of names for Unicode characters, selected from existing standards, for use in MathML or elsewhere). The Entity definitions draft was published for the first time.

2007-04-27: Working Drafts for MathML3 and MathML for CSS published

The Math Working Group published the first drafts of two new specifications: MathML version 3 is the latest version of MathML and A MathML for CSS profile describes how to use (a subset of) MathML3 that can be rendered in browsers that only support CSS. The new version of MathML will have better support for bidirectional text, better alignment with OpenMath, and will fix a number of errors and changes that have become necessary because of changes outside of MathML, such as new versions of Unicode.

2006-04-05: Dadzilla, a MathML browser supporting Arabic

(Dadzilla can display right-to-left mathematics.)   Dadzilla is a browser that can display MathML. Versions 1.1 (Linux) and 1.2 (Windows) support MathML in Arabic, as described in the W3C Note “Arabic mathematical notation,” as well as mixed Latin and Arabic texts. Dadzilla has been written by Mustapha Eddahibi and Azzeddine Lazrek (Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech, Morocco) and is based on Mozilla.

2006-01-31: New W3C Note “Arabic mathematical notation”

The Math IG published a note called “Arabic mathematical notation,” which analyzes the use of MathML in documents written in the Arabic script. There are pitfalls in the correct implementation of MathML in right-to-left scripts, but there are also limitations of MathML itself that might require an update of the standard.

2005-02-10: Blogging maths with MathML and Movable Type

Jacques Distler has adapted MovableType into a MathML publishing platform. With the help of a plugin, TeX equations in weblog entries and in comments are automatically converted to MathML. Technical details are on his weblog. The String Coffee Table is another weblog making extensive use of this technology.