[runarberg]

The point is that MathML is easier to translate to then many of these other languages. I wrote a language my self a few years ago that translates to MathML (https://runarberg.github.io/mathup/) and MathML was an absolute joy to target.

In mathup I included a second target to update the DOM directly .toDOM() and .updateDOM(oldMathNode) instead of .toString(). This would have been quite difficult if there wasn’t a nice mapping between the language and the DOM nodes. By implementing math in MathML browsers have made it easier for us software authors to write these other languages that serve different purpose then LaTeX. Our users benefit from this proliferation. Ultimately they don’t need to know which language is the native one, because all they write is:

    <math-up>ln x = int_1^x 1/t  dt</math-up>

And let the library translate to MathML for them.