Many in the education, math, and science communities create web pages with math and other formulas in them. If your technical markup is in the form of MathML, you should know that MathPlayer is our free, high-performance display engine that allows Internet Explorer (IE) to display MathML – something IE cannot do natively.

We are close to releasing a MathPlayer 2.1 beta, and are looking for beta testers. MathPlayer 2.1 will feature IE7 compatibility, accessibility (math to speech) enhancements, and lots of small bug fixes and enhancements. A more complete list of fixes will be provided to beta testers later.

If you create web pages using MathML, and are interested in being a beta tester, please e-mail us at beta@dessci.com.

Thanks,
Bob Mathews

I am a passionate advocate of open-source standards. The development and growth of the web (one of the most profound revolutions in history) was due in no small part to a simple, open, text-based mark-up langauge (HTML) that was not owned or controlled by a single corporation.

In order to understand the future of math on the web, it’s important to understand the larger issue of the standard XML family of mark-up languages. XML stands for eXtensible Mark-up Language, and is really a “meta-language” that can be used to create mark-up languages for specialized types of information. The modern, cleaned-up verson of HTML, known as XHTML is an XML. The Mathematics Markup Langauge (MathML) is an XML. But there are dozens of other–for finance, music, chemistry, graphics, and so on. The content-rich, well-behaved web document of the future will consist of a number of XMLs working in harmony.

In particular, the well-behave math document of the future will consist of basic exposition in XHTML, mathematical expressions in MathML, graphics in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and possible lots of other stuff–interactive “mathlets” in Java or Flash, audio clips, video clips, worksheets, and so on. XHTML is the expository glue that hold these elements together, and provides the basic document structure (headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on).

The real power of XML is that it has rigid, consistent rules and thus can be processed easily by various hardware and software agents (standard PCs, small, hand-held devices, printers, readers for the blind, mathematical software, and so forth).

The future is potentially very bright for web-based mathematical documents, but as always, the forces holding us back are ignorance and inertia. If you are interested in these issues, I recommend that you browse the web site of the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the web.

The goal of this blog is to foster a discussion that will follow up on one begun at the 2006 Math Gateway Partners Meeting at the Mathematical Association of America in DC on April 8, 2006. There, Kyle Siegrist gave a summary of the state of MathML. What followed was a lively discussion of the merits and difficulties of writing and reading MathML compared with writing in TEX and converting to PDF files. In particular, Frank Wattenberg made the case for writing mathematics in TEX and converting the result to pdf files. I hope that both Kyle and Frank will enter this discussion with a detailed presentation of their opinions.

The “experts” in this blog are:

Lang Moore. Executive Editor of the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL), director of the Math Gateway Pathways Project within the National Sciences Digital Library, co-director (with David Smith) of the Duke Connected Curriculum Project, and co-developer (with David Smith) of an online, interactive calculus course.

David Smith. Founding editor of the Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA), co-director (with Lang Moore) of the Duke Connected Curriculum Project, and co-developer (with Lang Moore) of an online, interactive calculus course.

Kyle Siegrist. Current editor of the Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA) and developer of the Virtual Laboratories in Probability and Statistics web site.

Frank Wattenberg. Author of numerous online, interactive learning materials in mathematics. See, for example, the OSSLETS Collection in the Digital Classroom Resources component of MathDL.