[Moin-user] What is MathML? Should I care?

[Paul Moore]

On 12/9/05, skip at pobox.com <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>     Frank> I'm trying to use MathML Support with MoinMoin 1.5.0beta5...
>
> Hijacking your thread...  What is MathML?

Basically, an XML-syntax extension to allow incorporation of maths in (X)HTML.

>  What does it offer beyond the LaTeX macro/parser stuff I installed from the
> MacroMarket?

Native display of maths, rather than generated image files. Oh, and
less complete cross-browser support :-) (Although there's a plugin for
IE, if you care about that browser).

>  A quick Google
> took me to w3.org, and my Firefox instance was able to display some of the
> test page, though it is missing fonts.  Though LaTeX is complex, lots of
> math types here learned it when doing their dissertations.  MathML input
> doesn't look very much like the equations it encodes...

You might want to look at ASCIIMathML
(http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html) which offers a
more TeX-like syntax. It's not directly supported within MoinMoin, but
I'd have thought that it wouldn't be too hard to write a macro.
(There's some notes on using it on the MoinMoin wiki, but they seem
old, and related to older versions of Moin and ASCIIMathML - as well
as being quite complex...)

Paul.