NAME Timoney Richard M.
AFFIL Senior Lecturer
HREF
E-MAIL richardt@maths.tcd.ie
WORKPLACE School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
WORKPLACE_HREF http://www.maths.tcd.ie
WORKPLACE_ADDRESS_ School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
HOME_PHONE +353-1-289 6900
OFFICE_PHONE +353-1-608 1196
INTERESTS Complex analysis; computing for mathematics
TITLE Style sheet languages and mathematical material
ABSTRACT: Standards are emerging for distributing mathematical material on the World Wide Web, based on the assumption that it is desirable to be able to deal interactively with mathematical material over the web. The MathML language is recommendation of the W3C consortium and is implemented in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML is a simplified variant of the ISO standard SGML or Standard Generalised Markup Language). MathML has a subset in common with the OpenMath recommendations for a standard way to exchange mathematical material between computer systems.

This talk will consider the problem of rendering or formatting mathematical material descibed in these langauges. Without a solution to this problem MathML will not be useful and we will consider what is involved in solving the problem in the context of various ways of defining renderings for XML and SGML documents. The suitability of the existing style sheet languages such as CSS and DSSSL for this task will be discussed and we will discuss the requirements of MathML with regard to the proposed W3C standard XSL.