XML News from Thursday, May 3, 2007

The W3C Math Working Group has posted the first public working draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. Changes since 2.0 include content dictionaries, "a mechanism for recording that a particular notational structure has a particular mathematical meaning". Version 3.0 is also supposed to enable easier markup of elementary school mathematics.


The W3C Math Working Group has also posted the first public working draft of A MathML for CSS Profile . "This document presents a subset of MathML 3.0 [mathml3] which can be used to capture the structure of mathematical formulas in a way particularly suitable for further CSS formatting. This subset, called here a MathML profile, is expected to facilitate adoption of MathML in web browsers and CSS formatters, since it emphasizes the widely adopted CSS [css] visual formatting model enhanced with only a few mathematically oriented extensions. These are present to allow formatting some complex inline expressions requiring special layout schemata given in presentational MathML. The development of this CSS-oriented profile is coordinated with ongoing work on CSS3 and may require a limited set of new properties to be added to existing modules. The full MathML specification defines a more extensive markup language for mathematical formalism than can readily be rendered using the present CSS visual formatting model and its realizations."


Elsevier has released xqdoc, an open source "automated documentation tool for XQuery". Supported engines include MarkLogic, eXist, and Saxon. xqdoc is published under the Apache 2.0 license. Java 1.4 or later is required.