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CSS Warrior

Towards universal math style sheet

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In spite of the fact that world wide web emerged in one of the center of European science — CERN, web standards failed to address needs of scientific community and most of current scientific articles (especially in technical areas like mathematics, physics and chemistry) are distributed in PDF format instead of more accessible and web friendly XML based solutions. One of the reasons for current situation is inability of browsers to render mathematical expressions. One way to address problem is to implement presentational MathML in all browsers.

Another one that was frequently discussed on Opera forums it to find CSS based solution.
The idea behind universal math style sheet was to write single CSS2.1 style sheets that would handle arbitrary complex math formulae obtained by combining and nesting subscripts, uperscripts, prescripts, under and over scripts, fractions, operators, matrices, vectors, determinants, cases, accents, fences, radical and other mathematical expressions. In this case any good CSS rendering engine would be able to render mathematical expressions without having native LaTeX/MathML/EMS support. The good news is that such a style sheet exists :idea: (that was not obvious from the first glance) and even works in one CSS rendering engine Prince 5 :smile: (CSS formatter developed by YesLogic). The bad news however that browsers does not have sufficient CSS2.1 support yet to process style sheet properly :cry:
Style sheet affords torture tests that are analog of MathML torture tests and contain some complex math expressions. Opera can't get them right, but
after fixing some CSS related bugs it should be able to render these and other much more complex formulae. Below are screen shots that show how Prince CSS formatter handles tests:

Formulae 1-7
Formulae 6-11
Formulae 12-19
Formulae 15-22
Formulae 23-28

Every XML element has right to have its own identity

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