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MathML

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is a pair of mathematical markup languages, an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. Its aim is to natively integrate mathematical formulae into World Wide Web pages and other documents. It is part of HTML5 and standardised by ISO/IEC since 2015.

Following some experiments in the Arena browser based on proposals for mathematical markup in HTML, MathML 1 was released as a W3C recommendation in April 1998 as the first XML language to be recommended by the W3C. Version 1.01 of the format was released in July 1999 and version 2.0 appeared in February 2001. Implementations of the specification appeared in Amaya 1.1, Mozilla 1.0 and Opera 9.5. In October 2003, the second edition of MathML Version 2.0 was published as the final release by the W3C Math Working Group.

MathML was originally designed before the finalization of XML namespaces. However, it was assigned a namespace immediately after the Namespace Recommendation was completed, and for XML use, the elements should be in the namespace with namespace URL http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML. When MathML is used in HTML (as opposed to XML) this namespace is automatically inferred by the HTML parser and need not be specified in the document.

Version 3 of the MathML specification was released as a W3C recommendation on 20 October 2010. A recommendation of A MathML for CSS Profile was later released on 7 June 2011; this is a subset of MathML suitable for CSS formatting. Another subset, Strict Content MathML, provides a subset of content MathML with a uniform structure and is designed to be compatible with OpenMath. Other content elements are defined in terms of a transformation to the strict subset. New content elements include <bind> which associates bound variables (<bvar>) to expressions, for example a summation index. The new <share> element allows structure sharing.

The development of MathML 3.0 went through a number of stages. In June 2006, the W3C rechartered the MathML Working Group to produce a MathML 3 Recommendation until February 2008, and in November 2008 extended the charter to April 2010. A sixth Working Draft of the MathML 3 revision was published in June 2009. On 10 August 2010 version 3 graduated to become a "Proposed Recommendation" rather than a draft. An implementation of MathML 2 landed in WebKit around this same time, with a Chromium implementation following a couple of years later, although that implementation was removed from Chromium after less than a year.

The Second Edition of MathML 3.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation on 10 April 2014. The specification was approved as an ISO/IEC international standard 40314:2015 on 23 June 2015. Also in 2015, the MathML Association was founded to support the adoption of the MathML standard. At that time, according to a member of the MathJax team, none of the major browser makers paid any of their developers for any MathML-rendering work; whatever support existed was overwhelmingly the result of unpaid volunteer time/work.

In August 2021, a new specification called MathML Core was published, described as the "core subset of Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML, that is suitable for browser implementation." MathML Core set itself apart from MathML 3.0 by including detailed rendering rules and integration with CSS, automated browser support testing resources, and focusing on a fundamental subset of MathML. An implementation was added to Chromium at the beginning of 2023.

MathML deals not only with the presentation but also the meaning of formula components (the latter part of MathML is known as "Content MathML"). Because the meaning of the equation is preserved separate from the presentation, how the content is communicated can be left up to the user. For example, web pages with MathML embedded in them can be viewed as normal web pages with many browsers, but visually impaired users can also have the same MathML read to them through the use of screen readers (e.g. using the VoiceOver in Safari). JAWS from version 16 onward supports MathML voicing as well as braille output.

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