A worldwide standard for a maths, science and technology enabled web browser has moved a step closer with the announcement of an ambitious partnership between IBM and MathSoft
A worldwide standard for a maths, science and technology enabled web browser has moved a step closer with the announcement of an ambitious partnership between IBM and MathSoft, developer of Mathcad, the world's most widely used mathematics software. The project centres around IBM's techexplorer hypermedia browser, the plug-in for web browsers which reads and translates technical formulae written in expression codes of mark-up languages such as TeX, LaTeX and MathML.
Under the joint agreement, MathSoft will licence one million copies of techexplorer to integrate into its Mathcad technology.
The tailored product will enable MathSoft customers to publish technical documents as HTML with MathML, using techexplorer.
Dr. Paul Bragg, managing director of UK Mathcad distributor Adept Scientific, said: "MathML has offered considerable potential for some time as being the way of providing true mathematical objects on the web which the scientific community so badly needs. This exciting development is a big step towards being able to publish editable formulae in a vendor-independent format. "With Mathcad's massive user base and the acclaimed technology of IBM's techexplorer, the MathML standard for which we've all built up our expectations should reach critical mass." At the moment, technical authors and educational content providers can publish on the web, but only in a static and cumbersome format, which has prevented them from tapping into the internet's reach for meaningful dissemination of interactive, quality maths content.
Mimi Jett, techexplorer evangelist at IBM, said: "This ambitious partnership with MathSoft has the potential to change the face of math[s] publishing on the Web.
Our technologies have a powerful synergy built on the MathML standard, and we anticipate that together we will build a solution that will become a natural extension of today's Web standards and a vast improvement in the overall quality of communication on the Internet." Chris Randles, general manager of MathSoft's Engineering and Education Products Division, added: "Publishers, professionals and educators have long struggled with these limitations of the Web.
The advent of the MathML standard for publishing math[s] on the web has opened a window of opportunity. Not only does it make possible new authoring tools for creating such content conveniently, but it also provides the means to deliver a dynamic, interactive math[s] Web experience to 250 million Web users from within their browsers."
