“The driving focus in the first-step of the project is to
support Presentation markup, which is more general than Content
markup. It should be recalled that a XSL-T processor (such as
TransforMiiX which is scheduled to be directly available from
within Mozilla) enables the rendering of Content markup by first
transforming to Presentation markup. However, native support for
Content markup is envisaged at some stage in the MathML project.
This native option is primarily enabling, as it will provide
authors the ability to perform dynamic/interactive math with both
Presentation markup and Content markup through the DOM and
JavaScript. In the meantime authors can simply transform Content
markup to Presentation markup and/or use parallel markup.”
“Efforts of the MathML project have culminated to the point
where all presentational tags are recognized, except the alignment
tags and –both of which happen to be unsupported by most of the
existing MathML renderers. Some presentational tags need another
pass to further beautify their layout, by filling such things as
the italic correction and/or the amount of spacing between some
tags. This finishing stylistic touch is motivated by the
professionalism that authors have come to expect from sophisticated
mathematical typesetting system such as TeX/LaTeX.”
“Also, further work remain to render in a fully standards
compliant manner, or at least at a level where its usage is
pleasant when laying out common mathematical 2D constructs such as
matrices, arrays, commutative diagrams. Progress in this direction
will rely upon some other work in the CSS2
model that Gecko implements.”