Igalia announced that they have submitted an intention to release MathML support in Chromium, and confirmed that they have received native support in Chromium Dev 105 released last Friday.
This is an important milestone and means we are one step closer to the goals set four years ago. Back in 2018, we started conversations with Chromium engineers and the W3C, announcing that we would be launching the MathML project in November 2018, with grants from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Alfred P. Sloan Fund Initial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Along the way, we helped re-establish the W3C Math Working Group and worked with other working groups and browser vendors to create a new specification called MathML-Core. This specification represents an interoperable subset of the initially tall and unspecified MathML 3 in a way that integrates well with the rest of the web platform. To date, there are over 24,000 checks in the Web Platform Test, covering parsing, rendering, and the integration of MathML with the rest of the platform.
What does that mean
MathML is a specification based on the XML standard. After Google enables MathML support by default in Chromium, we can natively display various super-complex mathematical formulas and languages directly in the browser.
For reference, let’s compare the rendering styles of older browsers:
In fact, MathML has a very long history, and Apple has been supporting it since Safari 5.1. It is worth mentioning that Chrome 24, which once belonged to the same WebKit kernel as Safari, also briefly supported this standard, but Google subsequently disabled it in Chrome 25 for security reasons.
Now, nine years later, with the continuous efforts of Igalia, the mathematical typesetting in web pages has finally ushered in the dawn again.
If you like our news and you want to be the first to get notifications of the latest news, then follow us on Twitter and Facebook page and join our Telegram channel. Also, you can follow us on Google News for regular updates.