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Can your browser display mathematical functions?

Published October 2nd, 2007 12:41 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman

Opera is experimenting with adding support for MathML to the browser. Using this, you would be able to display complex mathematical functions on webpages without having to rely on an external plugin.

You would write mathematical functions in the browser using plain old XML and CSS. Such as:

<mroot> 
  <mi>radix</mi>
  <mi>radicand</mi>
</mroot>

The Opera team working on MathML support is looking for feedback. If you’re a developer of authoring tools or site content, tell them what you think about it. Check out the discussions at the MathML forum thread over at Dev.Opera.

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8 Comments

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  1. 1 BAMAToNE Oct 2nd, 2007 at 1:59 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Windows Windows XP

    That’s pretty nifty!

  2. 2 Vanish Oct 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Windows Windows Server 2003

    Wonderful function!

  3. 3 Joonas Lehtolahti Oct 2nd, 2007 at 3:16 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.23 on Windows Windows XP

    I have been waiting for this kind of things directly into Web browsers for a while. Great going, Opera!

  4. 4 James Cassell Oct 2nd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.23 on Windows Windows Vista

    I would definitely welcom MathML support. It is so much better than having to generate images to show such things.

  5. 5 WildEnte Oct 2nd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.23 on Windows Windows XP

    write a devtool “LaTeX to MathML” (if that doesn’t exist yet). People giving talks in Math or physics sometimes use LaTeX to prepare their presentations, which is somewhat nice but can also be a pain. LaTeX is great for formulae. Would be great to have LaTeX in my browser this way.

  6. 6 (matTE0) Oct 3rd, 2007 at 3:45 am
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Windows Windows XP

    There’s always the problem with XSLT:
    http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/pmathml2.xml
    XSLT processing failed!

  7. 7 Øyvind Ø Oct 3rd, 2007 at 9:56 am
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Xubuntu Linux Xubuntu Linux

    Is there any tool that would do conversion between a normal calculation and that kind of markup? Ie: (3*4)/2 -> MatML? If not, that sounds like a fun project.

    - ØØ -

  8. 8 Jeroen Oct 3rd, 2007 at 3:33 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Linux Linux

    WildEnte, Øyvind Ø,

    There is itex2mml. It transforms some subset of LaTeX into MathML. Even inside HTML.

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Opera Watch, an Opera browser blog, is run by Daniel Goldman, who used to work for Opera Software as a Technical Evangelist.

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