Peter Krautzberger
Manager, MathJax

"Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics."

Shakuntala Devi

Source: xiver/Thinkstock

It has always surprised me a little that the web – created at CERN by a trained physicist turned computer scientist – was born without much consideration for math and science. Of course, it isn’t all that surprising since the original HTML lacked more basic things (such as support for tables or images). Either way, people did see the need early on and in 1995 the draft of HTML 3 proposed a [itex] tag, adding basic math support in HTML. Unfortunately, HTML 3 was rejected by browser vendors, and its more fortunate successor, HTML 3.2,dropped the [itex] tag (among other things). As was the fashion of the time, the [itex] tag was turned into a separate XML specification and within a year MathML was born. Problem solved? Not quite.

MathML did turn out to be hugely successful in the XML world. Authoring and conversion tools quickly made MathML easy to create and edit while publishers adopted MathML in their XML workflows. The main reason was that MathML provided a robust, exchangeable, and reusable format for rendering and archiving equational content. However, XML did not succeed as much on the open web and the XML legacy made it difficult to use MathML in HTML itself. This meant that mathematics (and by extension scientific notation) remained a second-class citizen. Surprisingly, MathML did not simply fade away like other web standards, but made a comeback in HTML 5, where we can now use it like any other tag. Problem solved? Not quite.

Despite its success, its rich ecosystem, and its importance for research and education, MathML continues to struggle on the most critical front: browser adoption. So far, not a single browser vendor has actively developed their MathML implementation. While Internet Explorer and Chrome lack MathML support entirely, Firefox and Safari at least accepted code contributed by volunteers (and in Mozilla’s case actively supported the code base). To compensate, the MathJax project (disclaimer: which I work for) developed an open-source JavaScript solution that authors and publishers can easily drop into their content. MathJax renders MathML on the fly, providing high-quality output that works everywhere out of the box, using only web standards such as HTML and CSS. A joint venture of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics with the support from numerous sponsors, including Wiley, MathJax has become the gold standard for math on the web with our free CDN service alone registering 35 million daily visitors. Problem solved? Not quite.

While we are proud of our accomplishments at MathJax, we know that we can only provide half the solution: native browser support must be the goal. Only native browser support can make MathML universal, helping everyone and allowing people to push the envelope for math and science on the web further. I believe a crucial role lies with publishers. Taking a cue from Forbes, now every publishing company is a web technology company. Not being involved in the development and implementation of web standards is a bit like printing books but not caring about literacy rates – if you build it, they still can’t come! When it comes to the development of the web, scientific publishers can become the bridge between authors and standards bodies and they can be instrumental in supporting the development of tools and processes that push everyone forward. Problem solved? Not quite but if you build this

The re-integration of MathML into HTML5 was a huge step towards math and science becoming first class citizens on the web. MathML is not only a fully accessible exchange format for mathematics but it is also part of other scientific markup such as the Chemistry Markup Language and the Cell Markup Language. The future of MathML in browsers will determine the future of scientific markup on the open web. In the end, a chemical reaction or a data plot has no more reason to be a binary image than an equation – we need markup that is alive in the page and can adapt to the needs of the users. Only this will allow us to develop new forms of expressing scientific thought, forms that are leveraging the full breadth of the open web platform and that are truly native to this amazing medium called the web. And that would be an exciting problem to have.