Announcing ... MathML! (WebKit)
webkit.org
webkit.org
[1] This is where the word "non-trivial" usually goes, but not this time.
1. The semi-official answer seems to be to use a WYSIWYG editor, which seems to be the solution XML proponents take to any syntax problem. ;-) For example, you can export to MathML from OpenOffice's equation editor.
2. If your goal is just to display math in webpages, there are some .js libraries that replace MathML's concrete syntax inline: you write a different syntax directly in your markup, and then it's converted at load time to MathML for browser rendering. The first widely used one was ASCIIMathML (http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html), which inspired LaTeXMathML (http://math.etsu.edu/LaTeXMathML/), and possibly others.
3. There are a number of offline translators from TeX math syntax to MathML. I've only ever used Blahtex (http://blahtex.org/), but there are a ton, in various stages of completeness and maintained-ness.
edit: it looks like the original blahtex is abandoned for a few years now, but a maintained descendant is here: http://gva.noekeon.org/blahtexml/
Now I only need something that will let me paste Matlab figures into HTML documents as SVG... (would make for a great research wiki.)
If anyone out there knows OCaml enough to improve its emitter that would mean MathML for Wikipedia articles in WebKit browser once this comes out.
The rest of that is gorgeous, though. Awesomeness.
edit: nope, r65398 doesn't fix it.
Here's to hoping we see this trickle down to UIWebView soon!
More importantly, to understand the same formula under different notations.
Different fields within maths, engineering & physics frequently reuse names and symbols to mean different things, so formulas which look the same can have completely different meanings. And as you alluded to, formulas which look different can end up meaning the same thing.
MathML is split into presentation markup and content markup. The presentation markup describes the rendering of a formula; the content markup describes its semantics. If anyone actually used the semantic markup, it could help with this problem.