MathML is a failed web standard
It’s instructive to see how different MathML is from other math markup languages. Here’s the quadratic formula:<p>In troff,
x = {-b +- sqrt { b sup 2 - 4ac}} over 2a<p>In TeX,
x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}} \over {2a}<p>In plain Unicode,
𝑥 = (−𝑏 ± √(𝑏² − 4𝑎𝑐))⁄2𝑎<p>In MathML,
&lt;mrow&gt;&lt;mi&gt;x&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mi&gt;=&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mfrac&gt;&lt;mrow&gt;&lt;mi&gt;−&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mi&gt;b&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mi&gt;±&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;msqrt&gt;&lt;mrow&gt;&lt;msup&gt;&lt;mi&gt;b&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mi&gt;2&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;&#x2F;msup&gt;&lt;mi&gt;−&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;mi&gt;4ac&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;&#x2F;mrow&gt;&lt;&#x2F;msqrt&gt;&lt;&#x2F;mrow&gt;&lt;mi&gt;2a&lt;&#x2F;mi&gt;&lt;&#x2F;mfrac&gt;&lt;&#x2F;mrow&gt;<p>MathML is simply unreasonable to write by hand. Most of the time it’s only ever used as an interchange format, automatically generated by tools.<p>Indeed, the only time I ever use it is with mandoc(1), the default manpage formatter on BSD, Illumos, and some Linuxes, which converts equations to MathML when converting manpages to HTML.