[sharpneli]

MathML is probably the best example of the late 90's early 2000's XML craze when everything was going to be XML and it was the best thing ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Example_and_comparison_...

Comparison to LaTex is almost hilarious. Showing well how in the end XML managed to combine the properties of Binary and Text formats. It's slow to parse like text format and hard for humans to read, like binary formats.

Personally I'd also really love that they'd just standardize LaTex or something similar. Why invent some non human readable mess when there is already a perfectly functional and widely used notation available?

[aplaice]

XML is faster and far simpler to parse than TeX. To the extent that you need to (if for whatever reason you don't want to rely on a LaTeX to MathML or Ascii to MathML converter) you can make the quadratic equation MathML slightly more readable, by not using hex entities, but unicode for − and ±, and the named entity for ⁢.[0] Furthermore, you (and I!) are just far more familiar with TeX, which makes the comparison in readability not particularly fair. Finally, much of the invisible, seemingly redundant mark-up, such as ⁢ or ⁡, can help you avoid some of TeX's ambiguities — e.g. is $ f(a+x) $ the function $f$ acting on $(a+x)$ or $f$ multiplying $(a+x)$?[1] If you were to omit this mark-up (and if you're converting from TeX to MathML and don't want your converter to engage in guesswork, you have to) the MathML would be even simpler.

Using the same format for equations as for the rest of the document (i.e. HTML/XML) is advantageous (in addition to the parsing benefits). In particular, you can use the same mechanisms for styling and transforming elements, as you can for the whole document. For instance, you could easily style parts of an equation, provide pop-ups that explain what each symbol means, when you hover over it, or interactively change the equation. (Much of this hasn't actually been done, outside experiments, because only Firefox properly(-ish) supports MathML, so it would have been wasted effort.)

[0] https://gist.github.com/aplaice/266b092bc48afbbdd46cdbd0ca81...

[1] Presentation MathML is still obviously not semantic, but it can be better in this respect than default TeX — there have been proposals for semantic TeX, but none of them have really caught on.

[sharpneli]

XML and readability are orthogonal concepts in the end. Basic html is easily editable and readable by humans. There is nothing preventing them from making an actually human editable XML markup language for maths. And that is the sad part.

As MathML is not human readable nor editable it’s effectively an opaque image format that can be manipulated from JS side and that scales like vector graphics.

[pvorb]

Yep. MathML is quite similar to SVG in that it's really hard to write by hand and you need editors to make it accessible.

[jahewson]

MathML was created as a human-readable interchange format. It was never intended to be written by humans. Much like how HTML is often generated from markdown nowadays.

It was specifically created to avoid TeX being used on the web, because TeX is ill-defined, loosely structured and lacks basic functionality such as Unicode support.

[conistonwater]

MathML is not human-readable as shown by the example in the wikipedia link, and TeX is supposed to have Unicode support these days, assuming you have a properly configured modern system, that's not a good example.

[phkahler]

HTML was meant to be written by humans.