I have inserted a formula in a HTML document and now I cannot edit it. Why not?

I have inserted a formula in a HTML document and now I cannot edit it. Why not?

There is currently no standard for embedding mathematical formulas in HTML documents. For this reason OpenOffice.org saves formulas in HTML documents as bitmap pictures (in GIF format), which every browser can display.

This has the consequence that when you close and reopen your document the formulas are no longer editable, because they cannot be reconstructed from the bitmap.

This solution has a number of other problems, for example the formulas don't look good when printed; in fact they look ugly.

A standard as to how MathML formulas can be embedded in HTML (or XHTML) pages is expected to appear in the future. Since OpenOffice.org can export HTML as well as MathML it would be reasonable to expect that it will support this standard when it arrives.

Another issue here, however, is that this also requires that browsers support MathML. The Mozilla project is working on this, see www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/.