First Public Working Draft: Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 4.0

The Math Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 4.0. MathML is a markup language for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this for text.

This specification is intended primarily for those who will be developing or implementing renderers or editors, or software that will communicate using MathML.

About 38 of the MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another about 170 provide a way of unambiguously specifying the intended meaning of an expression.

While MathML is human-readable, authors typically will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML.

MathML4 is the 4th version of the language, which started with MathML 1 in 1998.