The MathML standard for describing mathematical expressions, adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is based on key ideas from Wolfram Research's typesetting technology. This close relationship between the web's markup standard and Mathematica's internal representation put Mathematica in a unique position. As a result, a full-featured authoring and evaluation environment for documents with MathML expressions is fully integrated into the flexible, extensible technical document authoring system built into Mathematica, Mathematica CalcCenter, and Publicon.

Why did the W3C drafting committee turn to Mathematica's box structure as the starting point? Wolfram Research had done many years of research into the representation, interpretation, and display of mathematical expressions as part of the development process of Mathematica. That effort gave us a thorough understanding of the difficult issues involved in fully integrating presentation and evaluation within a single environment.