Equations in Webpage

Need high browser compliance, high quality, and to be crawled / indexed

[vincevincevince]

A site of mine has many equations in it. At the moment they are .png files, but these never print as well as really vector / font data.

What do the standards say about writing equations in webpages (for display, as in mathematics)?

How can I embed them with good compliance?

What do other people do?

[lorax]

Time to learn a new markup language. [w3.org...]

[tedster]

Here's the W3C's MathML FAQ page [w3.org].

Also, IE does not currently offer support without a plug-in:

Browsers: all common browsers can display MathML equations, either through the use of plug-ins (like techexplorer or Mathplayer for Microsoft Internet Explorer) or native support (Mozilla, Netscape 7).

W3C reference [w3.org]

Not sure what this means when it comes to search engines. My hunch is that we're not quite there yet.

<added>
You may also find good help from the Google Directory - MathML [directory.google.com] section.
</added>

[edited by: tedster at 6:22 pm (utc) on May 6, 2003]

[lorax]

Good catch Tedster - I was under the assumption that since we're talking mathematic equations the audience would be someone like a University professor and would have the tools in place. Boy was that a major assumption. ;)

[vincevincevince]

Thanks :-) I like what I see... gonna start me a pile of learning on that :-) Now all I want is a search engine that'll let me use MathML as a query :p (dreaming)

oh, and my IE showed the MathML fine... and it's recently installed. my mozilla crashed, but it's not a stable build, so i can forgive it :)