Publications by topic: MathML, XML …

W3C Standards

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 2nd Edition

• David Carlisle (editor)
• W3C Recommendation, 10 April 2014

This specification defines the Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML. MathML is a markup language 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.

MathML can be used to encode both mathematical notation and mathematical content. About thirty-eight of the MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another about one hundred and seventy 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 special characters used for mathematics, their handling in MathML, their presence in Unicode, and their relation to fonts.

While MathML is human-readable, authors typically will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML. Several versions of such MathML tools exist, both freely available software and commercial products, and more are under development.

MathML was originally specified as an XML application and most of the examples in this specification assume that syntax. Other syntaxes are possible most notably [HTML5] specifies the syntax for MathML in HTML. Unless explicitly noted, the examples in this specification are also valid HTML syntax.

XML Entity Definitions for Characters (2nd Edition)

• David Carlisle (editor)
• W3C Recommendation, 10 April 2014

This document defines several sets of names, so that to each name is assigned a Unicode character or sequence of characters. Each of these sets is expressed as a file of XML entity declarations.

From ACM Journals

OpenMath, MathML, and XSL

David Carlisle
ACM SIGSAM Bulletin - Special issue of OpenMath, 2000

The above link enables free download of the paper from the ACM Digital Library. (Due to ACM restrictions it unfortunately doesn’t work from the “all-publications” page. If you are there please use the one on the topic page instead.)

OpenMath and MathML: semantic markup for mathematics

O. Caprotti, D. Carlisle
XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students - Special issue on markup languages, 1999

Unambiguous representation of mathematics is crucial for communications among humans or among computer systems. OpenMath is a standard aimed at supporting a semantically rich interchange of mathematics among varied computational software tools such as computer algebra systems, theorem provers, and tools for visualizing or editing mathematical text. MathML is a W3C Recommendation for the encoding of mathematics ‘on the web’ which also includes mechanisms for encoding mathematical semantics. We introduce each of these two languages and describe their relationships.

The above link enables free download of the paper from the ACM Digital Library. (Due to ACM restrictions it unfortunately doesn’t work from the “all-publications” page. If you are there please use the one on the topic page instead.)