Target Audience: Manager, Software Engineer, Marketer

Level of Session: Intermediate

The widespread adoption of the World Wide Web has resulted in a powerful medium for the dissemination of information, as well as a popular platform for application deployment. However, the transition from paper to web-based interactive scientific articles, books, journals and courseware has brought new challenges to users of the World Wide Web. Students, scientists, and engineers are now faced with the task of rendering the 2-D presentational structure of mathematics, as well as harnessing a wealth of scientific and technical software across international boundaries and markets. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1.0 specification provides a low-level format for describing mathematics as a means for rendering and as a basis for machine to machine communication. Indeed, the combination of MathML, general purpose XML processes and APIs such as the Document Object Model help facilitate the use and re-use of scientific content.

This talk will provide an overview of the steps taken to date by the W3C Math Working Group to bring scientific and technical documents to web users. In particular, we will describe how MathML 1.0 and Unicode combine to represent general mathematical expressions in ways that can be used for web (and print) display and for mathematical manipulations.