MathML Sucks

4 comments

1. Calm down, man! It’ll be okay! It’s not your fault. You are writ­ing the MathML right. It’s just that the web serv­er is not serv­ing your page as XML. So, the brows­er does­n’t know you’ve got XML in there and it’s just dis­play­ing it as HTML.

   There are sev­er­al ways to send the head­er info to the brows­er. One is to use PHP to send an extra head­er to the brows­er before it sends the page. To do this, you have to put this line of PHP:

   header(“Content-type: application/xhtml+xml”);

   at the *very* top of the page.

   Prob­lem is, if IE gets a page that is served as XML (i.e. Con­tent-type: application/xhtml+xml), it gets com­plete­ly con­fused because it does­n’t know what real XHTML is. So, you’d have to use PHP to deter­mine what mime types the brows­er will accept. Then, con­di­tion­al­ly send the header:

   if (stristr($_SERVER[“HTTP_ACCEPT”],“application/xhtml+xml”)) {
   header(“Content-type: application/xhtml+xml”);
   } else {
   header(“Content-type: text/html”);
   }

   I don’t know if all of that is going to come out look­ing right after I sub­mit this form. I guess we’ll see. Give me a call if you want to discuss.

   Cheers.

2. Okay, as I sus­pect­ed, that PHP code did not come out right. There were some char­ac­ters that Word­Press threw out. I’ll have to send you the code in an email.

3. All this is not bla­tant­ly obvi­ous to the guy who is read­ing “Learn­ing php 5.” Thanks for all the help. I would call you tonight, but work the bed beck­ons (work tomor­row for the non-self employed).

   So does php need some work in order to be more eas­i­ly reck­on­ciled with XML? I would expect this is a bit piecemill to be using a lot.

4. It’s not PHP that’s caus­ing prob­lems. It’s actu­al­ly IE’s fault. If it weren’t for IE’s not being able to under­stand real XML, you could just tell Apache to serve all of your files as application/xhtml+xml. I’ll explain in more detail when we have a chance to talk on the phone.