Creating complex math in PHP isn't overly difficult, given all of the functions and operators that it supports. Sometimes, though, outputting the results of those equations has a particularly annoying downfall - formatting of the output dosen't match the "feel" of the equation at all.

Well, enter this new posting over on PHPMath.com. It talks about the development of tools that would read an arbitrary xml document and look for latex and graphviz markup tags. It would then process the latex or graphviz commands embedded in these markup tags and replace encountered tags with an XHTML reference to an image generated according to the particular latex markup tag you use and the attributes you specify as arguments.

Basically, it would look at an XML file, look for the specific formatting tags (latex and graphviz tags) and format it accordingly. The point that they want to get to eventually, though, is the replacement of this kind of output (text) with a dynamic XHTML IMG file outputted to the browser in the format of choice. Not only would this help amazingly with viewing and creating complex math functions on the web, but it would be a major step forward for the sharing of theories and ideas among the mathematics community...