Why MathML?
MathML is a W3C standard for putting mathematics on web pages. After a slow start, it is beginning to get some support. The Firefox web browser supports MathML, and Design Science provides a MathPlayer Windows plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
MathML is more attractive than TeX for those who wish to work to a standard, and those who are developing for interactive media rather than print. For example, the DAISY consortium for Digital Talking Books have adopted MathML as the standard they will use for mathematical content.
MathTran and MathML
By June 2007, MathTran made TeX rendering of mathematics available as a web service. It's main development focus is now on MathML, and in particular translation of TeX to MathML and vice versa.
MathML to TeX (we will be dealing at this stage only with presentation MathML) is fairly easy, and we intend to release a MathML-to-TeX translator early in July.
TeX to MathML is much harder. Parsing TeX is hard, whereas parsing XML is easy. This difficulty in parsing TeX is one of the atttractions of MathML. At present there are no standard parsers for TeX input, other than TeX the program.
We intend to release in early July a TeX-based tokeniser for TeX, that will translate TeX-coded mathematics into a parse-tree. We intend to release in late July a translator that will convert this parse-tree into MathML.
Round-tripping and the test suite
Both TeX and MathML are large languages. Today, for example, practically all of the world's advanced mathematics is coded in TeX. Both languages can be abused. Therefore, an important part of this project is to record standard encoding for a representative sample of mathematical formulae and equations. This will constitute a test suite, and we intend to release such in early July.
This software, as with the TeX-to-image translator, will be available both as a web service and as open-source software you can download and install.
A round-tripping joke
Some computer scientists, with the help of an English-Russian dictionary, produced a program to translate English to Russian. However, none of them could speak Russian, so they could not test the program.
However, one of them had the bright idea of using the Russian-English part of the dictionary to produce a program to translate Russian to English.
After much work, the grand moment occurred. The computer could
translate from English to Russian and back again. They chose to
round-trip the phrase The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak
.
And what did the computer return? The vodka is fine, but the
meat is lousy
.