Existing mathematical markup languages have contributed substantially to the development of MathML. Without question, the most influential mathematical markup language of recent years is the TeX typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth (Donald E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison Wesley, 1984). TeX is a de facto standard in the mathematical research community, and pervasive in the scientific community at large. TeX sets a standard for visual rendering quality, and much effort has gone into ensuring MathML can provide the same quality. As there is a large body of TeX legacy documents, and a large authoring community, a priority in the design of MathML was the ability to convert TeX input into MathML.
The SGML community has also worked extensively on encoding mathematics, and SGML-based encoding schemes are widely used by commercial publishers. The standard ISO 12083 DTD primarily describes the visual presentation of mathematical notation (Poppelier, N.A.F.M., E. van Herwijnen, and C.A. Rowley; Standard DTD's and Scientific Publishing , EPSIG News 5 (1992) 3, September 1992, 10-19).
MathML pays attention to compatibility with mathematical software, in particular computer algebra systems. Many of the presentation elements are based in part on Mathematica typesetting boxes.
MathML content elements derive in part from work on the Semantic Maths DTD (Buswell, Healey, Pike E.R & Pike M, "SGML and the Semantic Representation of Mathematics", UIUC Digital Library Initiative SGML Mathematics Workshop, May 1996 and SGML Europe 96 Conference, Munich 1996) developed by R.Pike under ISO 12083, and the OpenMath project (OpenMath Release 1, December 1996, http://www.openmath.org/). OpenMath develops SGML-based communication between mathematical software packages.
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