Tech News Update

From American Scientist:

The Web would make a dandy blackboard if only we could scribble an equation.

The world wide web was invented at a physics laboratory, and the first users were scientists and engineers. You might reckon, therefore, that this new channel of communication would be especially well adapted to scientific discourse—that it would facilitate the expression of thoughts like

or

If only it were so! The truth is, the basic protocols of the Web offer nearly no support for rendering mathematics or other specialized notations such as chemical formulas. Presenting such material on a Web page often requires software add-ons or plug-ins to be installed by the author or the reader or both. Fine-tuning the show of mathematics can be a fussy and finicky process, not much simpler than formatting equations with a typewriter. The results sometimes render differently—or not at all—in various Web browsers. This is a sad situation: As the Web has evolved into a thriving marketplace and playground, the scholarly and scientific community that made the technology has not been well served.

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