eds.activemath.org

There’s a wind for more content construction in the ActiveMath group, with at least two projects at the University focussed on creating content (and a adapt platform and…). And MathML starts to play an important role there.

What is nice is that several of these projects really require difficult math rendering which, of course, could be done with such as js-math (but would be slow, have no c&p, etc).

On the other hand, the fact that I work on the MathML testsuite really makes me realize the maturity of MathML and how far this got for elaborate math-rendering. Handcrafted solutions such as jsMath, ActiveMath’s HTML-and-CSS rendering of OpenMath, and many others, really seem temporary solutions for changing browser industry. We, as author support in LeActiveMath and other projects, have kept saying “well, this correct math-layout… cannot be done in HTML”.

So for anything a bit complex, and this starts with arrows on top of letters to denote vectors, we are starting to advise strongly MathML.

One of the reasons it’s not been the default in ActiveMath is that the DOM support is quite fragile in Mozilla-MathML and we could not yet offer the sub-term-selection and context-menu for MathML. Well, that is changing, see issue about MathML-rollovers we are currently hunting.

If we conclude the above, it is pretty clear that if Firefox (or Opera probably) is used, or if MathPlayer is detected, ActiveMath will default to MathML and that otherwise it will be strongly advised.