Presentation markup captures notational structure. It encodes the notational structure of an expression in a sufficiently abstract way to facilitate rendering to various media. Thus, the same presentation markup can be rendered with relative ease on screen in either wide and narrow windows, in ASCII or graphics, in print, or it can be enunciated in a sensible way when spoken. It does this by providing information such as structured grouping of expression parts, classification of symbols, etc.
Presentation markup does not directly concern itself with the mathematical structure or meaning of an expression. In many situations, notational structure and mathematical structure are closely related, so a sophisticated processing application may be able to heuristically infer mathematical meaning from notational structure, provided sufficient context is known. However, in practice, the inference of mathematical meaning from mathematical notation must often be left to the reader.
Employing presentation tags alone may limit the ability to re-use a MathML object in another context, especially evaluation by external applications.
Content markup captures mathematical structure. It encodes mathematical structure in a sufficiently regular way in order to facilitate the assignment of mathematical meaning to an expression by application programs. Though the details of mapping from mathematical expression structure to mathematical meaning can be extremely complex, in practice, there is wide agreement about the conventional meaning of many basic mathematical constructions. Consequently, much of the meaning of a content expression is easily accessible to a processing application, independently of where or how it is displayed to the reader. In many cases, content markup could be cut from a Web browser and pasted into a mathematical software tool with the confidence that sensible values will be computed.
Since content markup is not directly concerned with how an expression is displayed, a renderer must infer how an expression should be presented to a reader. While a sufficiently sophisticated renderer and style sheet mechanism could in principle allow a user to read mathematical documents using personalized notational preferences, in practice, rendering content expressions with notational nuances may still require the intervention of some sort.
Employing content tags alone may limit the ability of the author to precisely control how an expression is rendered.
Both content and presentation tags are necessary in order to provide the full expressive capability one would expect in a mathematical markup language. Often the same mathematical notation is used to represent several completely different concepts. For example, the notation x^i may be intended (in polynomial algebra) as the i-th power of the variable x, or as the i-th component of a vector x (in tensor calculus). In other cases, the same mathematical concept may be displayed in one of the various notations. For instance, the factorial of a number might be expressed with an exclamation mark, a Gamma function, or a Pochhammer symbol.
Thus the same notation may represent several mathematical ideas, and, conversely, the same mathematical idea often has several notations. In order to provide authors with the ability to precisely control notation while at the same time encoding meanings in a machine-readable way, both content and presentation markup are needed.
In general, if it is important to control exactly how an expression is rendered, presentation markup will generally be more satisfactory. If it is important that the meaning of an expression can be interpreted dependably and automatically, then content markup will generally be more satisfactory.