RE: [Bug-gnupedia] math content

[Dave]

>         Maybe MathML on the backend but translated to something else (an
> image?) for the client end?
>         Just a suggestion.

Until MathML is supported,you can have an image version of the mathematical 
expression (for the client).  At my company, we do this to export 
Mathematica notebooks to HTML.  Since Mathematica supports math-type and 
our customers want to create web pages from Mathematica files, we must go 
the image way until MathML is supported.  If not, you would have crazy 
things like this -

1.  Easy example - x^2(y^2-1) (people probably wouldn't complain reading this).

2.  Hard example - the integral of x^3 dx from (lower limit - the sum from 
x=1 to 5 of x^2) to (upper limit - 100).  In this case, you can get buy 
with a gif until MathML becomes popular.  The mathematica notebook however, 
stores the following -

Cell[BoxData[
    RowBox[{
        SubsuperscriptBox[
        "\[Integral]",
        RowBox[{

          UnderoverscriptBox[
            "\[Sum]", "x1",
            "5"],

          SuperscriptBox["x",
            "2"]}], "100"],
      RowBox[{

        SuperscriptBox["x",
          "3"],
        RowBox[{
        "\[DifferentialD]",
          "x"}]}]}]], "Input"]

At my company we have several internal tools for experimenting conversion 
between tex, mathematica, mathml, and images.  For MathML -> GIF, we 
currently have a web page set up to input a MathML expression.  The server 
pipes it through Mathematica, which in turn exports a gif.  It works like a 
charm.  You of course would not want this done on the fly however because 
of server load.  The back-end page would have to store both the MathML and 
the image, perhaps w/ a flag or something to say that if MathML can be 
properly rendered, to remove the image.

-Dave