Interoperability makes the web better for everyone, allowing users to have a great experience regardless of their choice of browser. We have been working on MathML Core making across browser engines as part of an agreement with the Sovereign Tech Fund. There are some exciting developments and new features!
Interoperability makes the web better for everyone, allowing users to have a great experience regardless of their choice of browser. We have many standards that shape how the internet should work, drafted from consensus between different engine makers and third parties. While having specs on how everything should function is great, we still need to align the different browser implementations. This can be tricky as all of them have their peculiarities, and not all browsers agree on what is a priority for them. The goal of the Interop program is to select a few important features that all engines will prioritize, so users and editors can finally benefit from them.
A few months ago I joined Igalia's web platform team (and I'm really happy about it!). Thanks to an agreement with the Sovereign Tech Fund, this year we will be working on MathML and other important Interop areas.
This post contains MathML examples. Each formula is represented twice. Your browser renders the left one from the HTML code, while on the right there is a pre-printed SVG as a reference of how it should look. Keep in mind that most of these features are either experimental or have just landed, so you may need the latest version of a browser to view them correctly.
A bit of history
MathML was first published in 1998, and it grew to be a gigantic project that sought to define how mathematical notation should be rendered. However, due to its complexity, the implementations of the browser engines were wildly different and incomplete. This meant that editors could not rely on it, since users would see very different content depending on what they were browsing with.
< math > < msubsup > < mo > ∫ < mn > 0 < mn > 1 < mrow > < msup > < mi > x < mn > 2 < mo > + < mn > 1
∫ 0 1 x 2 + 1
This is why MathML Core was born. It is a small subset of MathML 3 that is feasible to implement in browsers. It is based on the parts of the specification that are used in practice, adding important implementation details and testing.
To illustrate why this is important, Chromium had support for some parts of MathML when it was forked from WebKit. However, it proved to be very difficult to maintain and complete, so it was removed in 2013. My colleague Frédéric Wang led the effort to create a new implementation based on MathML Core, which was shipped in 2023, a huge milestone for the standard.
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