MathML Fundamentals

This chapter introduces the basic ideas of MathML. The first section describes the overall design of MathML. The second section presents a number of motivating examples, to give the reader something concrete to refer to while reading subsequent chapters of the MathML specification. The final section describes basic features of the MathML syntax and grammar, which apply to all MathML markup. In particular, Section 2.4 MathML Syntax and Grammar should be read before Chapter 3 Presentation Markup, Chapter 4 Content Markup and Chapter 5 Combining Presentation and Content Markup.

http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/chapter2-d.html