Most people are used to MathML on its own or inside XML-based formats. But now that people are starting to use math in HTML5, which has slightly different syntax rules, people asked for more explanation. MathML has the same structure and meaning independent of the concrete syntax, but may have to be written in a different way inside HTML5. The new specification explains that, and also makes sure that all examples (except, obviously, those that specifically demonstrate syntax issues) can be copied and pasted into an HTML5 context.

As far as implementations go, the new specification requires no changes. HTML5 implementations have to follow the syntax defined in the HTML5 specification, XML implementations follow the XML specification, and the MathML specification defines how to display and interpret the resulting elements. And that part has not changed.

The XML Entities specification was updated to include the latest Unicode specification. (The previous Recommendation referred to Unicode 5, the current version to 6.) Descriptions were added for symbols that are new in Unicode 6, including the new Arabic math symbols. The text was also reorganized for more clarity. No new entities were defined.

Although Firefox supports MathML, and MathJax can be used to emulate MathML in browsers that support JavaScript, the resulting rendering is not as good as one would hope: Before you convert a book with mathematical formulas to an e-book, you would want typesetting closer to the quality of paper books.

The problem is lack of programmer time. There are few people who can do the programming and they have little spare time. Frédéric Wang is one of them and the project is meant to allow him to work full-time for a few months.

The main goals of the project are twofold:

1. Create a collection of educational & scientific documents that will serve as examples & test cases for publishers and implementers.
2. Improve rendering quality in WebKit and Gecko so that EPUB publishers can rely on it.

His initial target is € 3960, or one person in France working full-time for three months.

The Profile describes which parts of MathML3 can be formatted with CSS and which can thus be displayed by many types of software that understand CSS but do not understand MathML itself. This allows quite a large part of MathML already to be used even though not all browsers and formatters implement full MathML yet.

The specification had already been tested and reviewed by the W3C members and the W3C Director in October 2010, but it has a normative dependency on CSS, and thus couldn't be a standard unless CSS Level 2 was a standard itself.

Compared to MathML 2, the major additions in version 3 are support for bidirectional layout, better linebreaking and explicit positioning, elementary math notations, and a new strict content MathML vocabulary with well-defined semantics.

MathML 3 is also part of version 5 of HTML (currently still in development), which means embedding math in Web documents will become easier, with direct import from HTML to mathematics software and vice versa.

The MathML for CSS Profile has also received positive reviews, but it cannot yet progress to W3C Recommendation, because it depends on CSS2, which is still in CR status. (The CSS working group expects CSS2 to become W3C Recommendation early in 2011.)