Math Jax: a platform for mathematics on the web
The MathJax project plugs the gap left by a lack of browser support for MathML, making it possible for mathematicians—and the scientific community at large—finally to take advantage of the MathML standard and all it implies.
Abstract
Over the past three years, a project has been quietly evolving that has important implications for those interested in using mathematical notation within webpages in a way that not only displays that mathematics beautifully but allows it to interact with other applications and environments. That project is MathJax [1], and it is an attempt to provide a universal, industrial-strength, mathon-the-web solution that is standards-based and applicable to a diverse range of audiences. Current users include publishers of large-scale scientific websites, bloggers and social networkers, users of course-management systems, and individual faculty members who just want to post their homework assignments easily online. Under the sponsorship of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Design Science, Inc. (DSI), with the support of StackExchange, the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier, the Optical Society of America (OSA), Project Euclid, WebAssign, and others, MathJax is an open-source project, drawing on the talents of a variety of individuals. MathJax builds on the techniques developed by the author as part of his earlier jsMath package [7] and can be considered the “next generation” of that software. Anyone who has tried to include mathematical notation in a webpage knows that this is not an easy task. The traditional solution is to use images of the equations and link those into the page to represent the mathematics. This is a cumbersome approach that has a number of drawbacks (it is hard to get the images to match the surrounding text, they don’t scale or print well, they cannot be easily copied, and so on). The Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) was intended to solve this problem (see [19] and [20]), but for a variety of reasons, more than a decade after its specification was released, most of the major browsers still don’t support it.1 The MathJax project plugs the gap left by a lack of browser support for MathML, making it possible for mathematicians—and the scientific community at large—finally to take advantage of the MathML standard and all it implies. In the past, images were the only reliable crossplatform way to present mathematical equations within webpages, despite their faults. Recently, however, several web technologies have come together that make it possible to use a different approach that can resolve a number of these issues. The increased speed of JavaScript engines, the standardization of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementations across browsers, the support for unicode fonts, and the ability to obtain fonts over the Web when they are not installed on the user’s computer can be harnessed to provide a means of including mathematics in webpages that overcomes many of the deficiencies inherent with the use of images. MathJax is being developed as a platform for mathematics in webpages that works across all the major browsers (including mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and Android phones). It allows authors to write their equations using several formats, including MathML and TEX, and displays the results using MathML in those browsers that support it or HTML-with-CSS in those that don’t. A Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) output mode is nearing completion, and other input and output formats are possible. For example, a user-written input processor for the ASCIIMathML format [8] is scheduled for inclusion in the next release of MathJax. Davide Cervone