It’s been a while since we have provided some update on MathML, so we’re pleased to be able to provide a number of updates today…

The MathML Working Group was successfully rechartered and has been meeting regularly in two subgroups: MathML general which meets regularly and discusses a broad range of topics about MathML and MathML-Core specifically which meets monthly with the aim of focusing on the MathML-Core specification and issues surrounding universal support in browsers specifically. Igalia is pleased to co-chair this group with Neil Soiffer and have several members contributing to both specifications and implementations. Today, the W3C announced that MathML-Core has become a First Public Working Draft, putting this work more firmly on a standards track.

As promised, after a short break, we have also renewed our work on upstreaming MathML-Core in Chromium. Thanks to progress on TablesNG (the tables related portion of the next generation layout engine in Chromium), we’ve been able to upstream some progress on tabular math. Really great and complete support for stretchy characters will take a while, but work there has also progressed very nicely recently, as you can see in the animation below.

You can try these for yourself in Chrome canary by enabling experimental web platform features.

We have also updated our Project Roadmap with these features and some next plans.

Given our experience over the last few years in helping re-establish MathML, as well as discussions and experiments since, we’re also looking forward to announcing some upcoming changes which we believe will help us better establish and communicate how MathML moves forward. More on that soon!