CSS Warrior

Being emerged in European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), world wide web quickly evolved into entertainment oriented media and left many scientists disappointed. Web standards were science unfriendly and embedding complex mathematical formulae in web pages was far from being easy. Many problems still remain open, we still don't have decent set of Unicode fonts with good coverage of math oriented Unicode ranges, we still can't agree on markup as bringing LaTeX, MathML, OpenMath, ISO 12083, XML MAIDEN and other approaches to commond ground is nearly impossible. Some dislike angle brackets some curly ones, some want to have self contained markup, some want to integrate math oriented markup with the rest of webstandards, some want to code pages manually, some think that what they see is what they get, some prefer to have clear hierarchical structure, some vote for drastically abridged Unicode based notations.

It looks like madhouse, but in next several years I think we will get our web back regardless what markup language we prefer to use. As CSS support in browsers grows stronger, capabilities of XML + CSS and XHTML + CSS publishing frameworks grow and merge more and more markup languages in single X(HT)ML + CSS framework at some point this will resolve formatting related problems of math community. Languages that for some reasons does not fit into this framework (MathML, ISO 12083, LaTeX), still can be handled in more awkward but in the same time more powerful XML + XSLT + CSS, XML + EcmaScript + DOM + CSS or even XML + XSLT + EcmaScript + DOM + CSS approaches. Combining text processing capabilities of XSLT or EcmaScript + DOM with formatting capabilities of CSS can yield good results (in the same time involving XSLT/DOM in rendering process slows down rendering and makes it non-incremental). Thus day when we will be able to place mathematics on web without tears is not very far and already today scientist are ready to deploy necessary XML/CSS/XSLT/DOM machinery.

Important steps in this direction are ability of Opera 9 and Prince 5 to handle maths in pure CSS, that on one hand turns green light for XML MAIDEN and on other hand makes in easier to write MathML and ISO 12083 implementations on the top of CSS rendering engine (that is not really good idea from web architecture point of view, as single XML + CSS framework is preferable to multiple presentational markup languages that often just duplicate existing functionality). In the same time javascript applications like jsMath, ASCIIMathML, HMath, Wiky (New!), UserJS for ISO 12083 provide good background for future web oriented client side scientific applications.