Itβs instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Hereβs the quadratic formula:
In troff,
x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a
In TeX,
x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a}
In plain Unicode,
π₯ = (βπ Β± β(πΒ² β 4ππ))β2π
In MathML,
<mrow><mi>x</mi><mi>=</mi><mfrac><mrow><mi>β</mi><mi>b</mi><mi>Β±</mi><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mi>2</mi></msup><mi>β</mi><mi>4ac</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mi>2a</mi></mfrac></mrow>
MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time itβs only ever used as an interchange format, automatically generated by tools.
Indeed, the only time I ever use it is with mandoc(1), the default manpage formatter on BSD, Illumos, and some Linuxes, which converts equations to MathML when converting manpages to HTML.
In troff, x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a
In TeX, x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a}
In plain Unicode, π₯ = (βπ Β± β(πΒ² β 4ππ))β2π
In MathML, <mrow><mi>x</mi><mi>=</mi><mfrac><mrow><mi>β</mi><mi>b</mi><mi>Β±</mi><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mi>2</mi></msup><mi>β</mi><mi>4ac</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mi>2a</mi></mfrac></mrow>
MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time itβs only ever used as an interchange format, automatically generated by tools.
Indeed, the only time I ever use it is with mandoc(1), the default manpage formatter on BSD, Illumos, and some Linuxes, which converts equations to MathML when converting manpages to HTML.