Out of the way

Web Directions South is the conference formerly known as Web Essentials. This year it has about 600 attendees, including 2 from Opera (David Storey is here for the second time in a row) and a guy who will be working for Opera after the conference (it's a big international mystery ).

It's a great conference. John and Maxine and the rest of the gang behind it get good speakers, got enough sponsors to get a good venue, and well over 500 people turn up for the two days - a gathering of people who understand Web standards and apply them to real life problems. It's great to be here and meet the cream of the Australian Web Industry - some of whom I am lucky enough to already know and some for the first time.

So I'm happy that the article came out while I am here (even if the timing is really actually just a coincidence).

MathML is a W3C specification (well, a series of them really) for doing Mathematics on the Web. It was W3C's first XML-based spec, and while it was implemented in specialist tools some time ago it has been slow to appear in common Web browsers. After all, most people don't do any mathematics. Well, after they leave school, and except when they are helping their kids with homework. Since most people go to school, actually most people will come across maths, even if it is only fairly basic. When I was at high school, that still meant doing some stuff where the layout is complex - too complex for current HTML.

Opera has actually had a way to support some MathML for a while, thanks to White_Lynx. But the latest technique is a big improvement. Instead of relying on some kind of transformation, it now renders directly... So if you want to see the latest state of MathML in Opera and how you can play with it, please read my "wonderful" article