Future WEB technologies and (La)TeX

An earlier question ("converting to HTML") addresses the issue of converting existing (La)TeX documents for viewing on the Web as HTML. All the present techniques are somewhat flawed: the answer explains why.

However, things are changing, with better font availability, cunning HTML programming and the support for new Web standards.

Font technologies

Direct representation of mathematics in browsers has been hampered up to now by the limited range of symbols in the fonts one can rely on being available. In the near future, we can expect rather wide availability of Unicode fonts with better coverage of symbols.

XML

The core of the range of new standards is XML, which provides a framework for better structured markup; limited support for for it has already appeared in some browswers.

Conversion of (La)TeX source to XML is already available (through TeX4ht at least), and work continues in that arena. The alternative, authoring in XML (thus producing documents that are immediately Web-friendly, if not ready) and using (La)TeX to typeset is also well advanced. One useful technique is transforming the XML to LaTeX, using XSLT, and then simply using LaTeX; alternatively, one may typeset direct from the XML source.

Direct represention of mathematics

MathML is a standard for representing maths on the Web; its original version is distinctly limited, but efforts to give it greater richness (approaching that of TeX) are under way. Browser support for MathML (e.g., in amaya, a version of the Netscape 'Open Source' browser mozilla and in specially extended versions of Internet Explorer) is becoming available. There's evidence that (La)TeX users are starting to use such browsers.

Work in both the TeX4ht and TtH projects, to produce MathML is well advanced.

Graphics

SVG is a standard for graphics representation on the web. While the natural use is for converting existing figures, representations of formulas are also possible, in place of the separate bitmaps that have been used in the past (and while we wait for the wide deployment of MathML).

Browser plug-ins, that deal with SVG are already available (Adobe offer one, for example).