Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0
W3C Candidate Recommendation 13 November 2000
- This version:
-
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-MathML2-20001113
Also available as: HTML zip archive, XHTML zip archive, XML zip archive, PDF (screen), PDF (paper)
- Latest version:
-
http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2
- Previous versions:
-
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-MathML2-20000328
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-MathML2-20000211
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991222
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991201
- Editors:
-
David Carlisle
(NAG)
Patrick Ion
(Mathematical Reviews, American Mathematical Society)
Robert Miner
(Design Science, Inc.)
Nico Poppelier
(Penta Scope)
- Principal Authors:
- Ron Ausbrooks, Stephen Buswell, Stéphane Dalmas, Stan Devitt, Angel Diaz, Roger Hunter, Bruce Smith, Neil Soiffer, Robert Sutor, Stephen Watt
Copyright © 1998-2000 W3C®MIT,
INRIA,
Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C
liability,
trademark,
document
use and software
licensing rules apply.
This specification defines the Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML. MathML is an XML application
for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and
content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served,
received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for
text.
This specification of the markup language MathML is intended
primarily for a readership consisting of those who will be developing
or implementing renderers or editors using it, or software that will
communicate using MathML as a protocol for input or output. It is
not a User's Guide but rather a reference document.
This document begins with background information on mathematical
notation, the problems it poses, and the philosophy underlying the
solutions MathML proposes. MathML can be used to encode both
mathematical notation and mathematical content. About thirty of the
MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another
about one hundred and fifty provide a way of unambiguously specifying
the intended meaning of an expression. Additional chapters discuss how
the MathML content and presentation elements interact, and how MathML
renderers might be implemented and should interact with
browsers. Finally, this document addresses the issue of MathML
characters and their relation to fonts.
While MathML is human-readable, it is anticipated that, in all but
the simplest cases, authors will use equation editors, conversion
programs, and other specialized software tools to generate
MathML. Several early versions of such MathML tools already exist, and
a number of others, both freely available software and commercial
products, are under development.
This section describes the status of this document at the
time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this
document. The latest status of this document series is maintained at
the W3C.
This is a Candidate Recommendation of the MathML 2 specification.
The W3C Math Working Group members consider this specification to be
stable and encourage implementation using it and comment on it. The
Candidate Recommendation review period ends on 14 December 2000.
Please send review comments before the end of the review period to
the public mailing list of the Math
Working Group (list archives).
Should this specification prove unexpectedly difficult to implement, the
Working Group will return the document to Working Draft status and
make necessary changes. Otherwise the Math Working Group anticipates
asking the W3C Director to advance this document to Proposed
Recommendation status.
This is still a W3C Working Draft for review by W3C members and other
interested parties. It is inappropriate to use W3C working drafts as
reference material, except in this case for trial implementations, or
to cite them as other than "work in progress". This is work
in progress and endorsement of it by, or the consensus in this regard
of, the W3C membership may not be assumed.
This document has been produced by the
W3C Math Working Group
as part of the activity of the W3C User Interface Domain. The
goals of the W3C Math Working Group are discussed in the W3C Math WG
Charter (revised February 2000 from original of 11 June 1998).
A list of participants in the W3C Math
Working Group is available.
A list of current W3C Technical Reports can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR.
The present draft is a revision of the earlier corrected
W3C
Recommendation MathML 1.01. It differs from it in that all chapters
have been updated and two new ones and some appendices added.
Chapters 1 and 2, which are introductory material, have been revised
to reflect the changes elsewhere in the document, and in the rapidly
evolving Web environment. Chapters 3 and 4 have been extended to
describe new functionalities added as well as smaller improvements of
material already proposed. Chapter 5 has been newly written to reflect
changes in the technology available. The major tables in Chapter 6
have been regenerated and reorganized to reflect an improved list of
characters useful for mathematics, and the text revised to reflect the
new situation in regard to Unicode. Chapter 7 has been completely
revised since Web technology has changed. A new Chapter 8 on the DOM for
MathML has been added; the latter points to new appendices D and E for
detailed listings.
The appendices have been reorganized into normative and
non-normative groups. Appendices D, E and G are completely new.
1 Introduction
1.1 Mathematics and its Notation
1.2 Origins and Goals
1.3 The Role of MathML on the Web
2 MathML Fundamentals
2.1 MathML Overview
2.2 MathML in a Document
2.3 Some MathML Examples
2.4 MathML Syntax and Grammar
3 Presentation Markup
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Token Elements
3.3 General Layout Schemata
3.4 Script and Limit Schemata
3.5 Tables and Matrices
3.6 Enlivening Expressions
4 Content Markup
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Content Element Usage Guide
4.3 Content Element Attributes
4.4 The Content Markup Elements
5 Combining Presentation and Content Markup
5.1 Why Two Different Kinds of Markup?
5.2 Mixed Markup
5.3 Parallel Markup
5.4 Tools, Style Sheets and Macros for Combined Markup
6 Characters, Entities and Fonts
6.1 Introduction
6.2 MathML Characters
6.3 Character Symbol Listings
6.4 Differences from Characters in MathML 1
7 The MathML Interface
7.1 Embedding MathML in other Documents
7.2 Generating, Processing and Rendering
MathML
7.3 Future Extensions
8 Document Object Model for MathML
8.1 Introduction
Appendices
A Parsing MathML
A.1 MathML as a DTD Module
A.2 Use of MathML without a DTD
A.3 SGML
A.4 The MathML DTD
B Content Markup Validation Grammar
C Content Element Definitions
C.1 About Content Markup Elements
C.2 Definitions of MathML Content Elements
D Document Object Model for MathML
D.1 IDL Interfaces
D.2 MathML DOM Tables
E MathML Document Object Model Bindings (Non-normative)
E.1 MathML Document Object Model IDL Binding
E.2 MathML Document Object Model Java Binding
E.3 MathML Document Object Model ECMAScript Binding
F Operator Dictionary (Non-normative)
F.1 Format of operator dictionary entries
F.2 Indexing of operator dictionary
F.3 Choice of entity names
F.4 Notes on lspace and
rspace attributes
F.5 Operator dictionary entries
G Sample CSS Stylesheet for MathML (Non-normative)
H Glossary (Non-normative)
I Working Group Membership and Acknowledgments (Non-normative)
I.1 The Math Working Group Memberships
I.2 Acknowledgments
J Changes (Non-normative)
K References (Non-normative)