W3C has just announced the relaunch of Math Activity, which had ended in November last year, to maintain the standard and set up a Math Interest Group. Read on for my commentary. As a former physicist, I can empathise with our scientific and technical colleagues as they struggled to communicate using symbolic notation on the web. With the introduction of MathML culminating in version 2.0 in 2001, things started to look up and with W3C members, such as Dave Raggett (another ex-physicist), early work on an equation editors (EZMath), MathML started to become accessible.
There are now many more MathML editors available. Major mathematical software packages such as Mathematica also support the exporting of MathML.
Additionally, current releases of e-learning products such as Questionmark, WebCT and Blackboard are incorporating the use of MathML equation editors, all helping make the use of mathematics on the web more attractive to the sections of the academic community who would otherwise tend to rely on converting LaTex or Microsoft Word documents to graphics.
The only downside to this is the necessity to rely on plug-ins to make the full interactivity of MathML available to the students.
Perhaps this is something the new W3C Math Interest Group will be able to look into.
