Why (and how) I am using XML and MathML

Following on from the MathML article by Peter Rowlett in MSOR Connections Nov 2005, the author describes personal reasons for why mathematicians should be using XML and MathML . Time has moved on and (La)TeX is simply not rich enough to present the meaning of the mathematics. Accessibility for blind students is improved using MathML, who find PDF documents virtually impossible to work with. With lecturer notes being produced in XHTML+MathML, students can be directed to suitable web browsers eg. Firefox to view maths documents, instead of PDF translations previously supplied. The author has begun to develop a system called gloss, which can convert text files into XML; a simple example of a sequence demonstrates that using the gloss system can avoid large amounts of MathML coding by automating the MathML creation. To date, experiments have been with Presentation-MathML, but Content-MathML focuses on the meaning of the maths and may be worth investigating for the semantic aspects. OpenMath is a more flexible XML mathematics format that concentrates on semantic aspects and can be used with Presentation-MathML….