Foreword

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I got involved with the Math Activity at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1995. Ever since, I have attended two or three meetings a year on the topic of MathML. At nearly every one of those meetings, the need for a book on the MathML has come up in one way or another. Anyone who has slogged through the MathML specification will know that it is neither an enjoyable read, nor a very good way to learn about using MathML. So the topic of an accessible book on MathML kept coming up, and the anxiety and hand-wringing it provoked became more and more intense as the MathML community continued to grow. Thus, I was relieved when I learned that Pavi Sandhu was writing a book on MathML. And after looking at a draft and discovering it was actually a good book on MathML, I was positively delighted!

It couldn't come at a better time. When the MathML Recommendation was first published in 1998, there was an initial surge in interest, and expectations were high. A number of specialized tools soon added MathML support. But rendering MathML in browsers proved to be a harder problem and only in the last few months has it really become practical on a large scale. In the intervening time, the lack of browser support had a distinctly chilling effect on the use and usefulness of MathML.

Now, however, MathML support is finally there in browsers, and there are clear signs of a resurgence. Publishers are again looking at MathML as a way of moving to XML work flows for their math and science materials, and as a means of unifying production streams for paper and electronic media. Distance learning vendors have begun embracing MathML as a solution for archiving, displaying, and manipulating mathematics on the Web. Makers of XML authoring tools and content management systems are starting to add MathML support. And most important, thousands of teachers, students and researchers are beginning to wonder if Math on the Web has finally come far enough to take a second look.

I confidently predict that with resources such as The MathML Handbook to guide them, many people will find that the time is indeed ripe for Math on the Web. And I look eagerly forward to the outpouring of creativity that will inevitably flow from that happy discovery.

Robert Miner
MathML 2.0 Recommendation Editor

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