EDUCATION FORUM Mathematics on the Web~ Part II (with Josh Cogliati) MathML and the Web Five years ago, in the June 1998 issue of S I G A C T News, the title of the Education Forum was "Mathematics on the Web." Five years a g o / A t that time I was lamenting the fact that it was virtually impossible to display mathematics in a Web page. Oh, it could be done by generating pictures (e.g., .gif files) of desired mathematics, but there was no markup for displaying mathematics seamlessly within the context of a regular Web page. Programs existed to turn I_4TEX files into some (usually unsatisfactory) combination of HTML for standard text and images for mathematics, but these were less than ideal. The real excitement expressed in that column was over the ongoing work on MathML, a markup language for expressing mathematics so that mathematics could not only be displayed properly (say in a Web page), but also so that it could be evaluated properly in a system such as Mathematica (see http://www.w3, org/Math/). Why the excitement? Because the seamless display of text and mathematics on the Web was something I was looking forward
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