A few words about MathML

MathML is a very old (1998) XML-based W3C standard which allows publishing mathematical content on the web. A particularly nice feature of this standard is that formulae can be included in the HTML source. However, such functionality requires browsers to support XHTML 1.1, a fairly new (2001) XML-based hypertext markup standard. As of May 2005, only Mozilla has satisfactory native MathML support (you may need to install a few fonts though), although Microsoft Internet Explorer with the so called “MathPlayer” plug-in can produce some scribble which somewhat resembles formulae.

Choosing between MathML and ersatz HTML on this website

There is no robust way to determine if a browser supports MathML. That's why I have to ask the gentle reader to choose for himself, whether he wants this site to use MathML or generate ersatz HTML-ish formulae instead. That's what the checkbox in the upper-right corner is for. Of course, my website tries hard to make the correct choice, but sometimes it is still necessary to change that. On this website, every MathML-containing page and the root page have this checkbox which always acts globally. Sometimes things are screwed up really badly (hello Opera), in which case you could go to the root page and uncheck this checkbox there.

Current MathML settings

• Inline MathML is turned ON
• MathML pages are served as application/xhtml+xml
• HTML standard is XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0

MathML example

Here is an expression for the free Wilson propagator in momentum space:

$$G\left(k\right)=\frac{\left(1-2\kappa \sum _{\mu }\cos p_{\mu }\right)-\mathrm{i}2\kappa \sum _{\mu }{\gamma }_{\mu }\sin p_{\mu }}{{\left(1-2\kappa \sum _{\mu }\cos p_{\mu }\right)}^2+4{\kappa }^2\sum _{\mu }{\sin }^2{p}_{\mu }}$$

Aren't you impressed by its looks? Then perhaps you should consider switching to Mozilla: with all the necessary fonts installed, it renders this propagator better than LaTeX.