Heh, I've never seriously tried to use MathML before. On the plus side, 
it does solve the problem I had (i.e., various math symbols have Unicode 
codepoints, but don't exist in any known typeface). On the other hand... 
it's a tad verbose.

With TeX, if you want to write "x" as a mathematical variable rather 
than a piece of text, you simply say "$x$". But by the power of MathML, 
if you want to do this in DocBook, you write

   <inlineequation>
     <math xmlns="http://www.w3c.org/1998/Math/MathML">
       <mrow><mi>x</mi></mrow>
     </math>
   <inlineequation>

which is somewhat more typing. There's probably some trick that removes 
the need to keep typing in the XML namespace URL every time, but even 
then you'd still have

   <inlineequation><math><mrow><mi>x</mi></mrow></math><inlineequation>

which is a lot of typing considering that only one single character of 
that will appear in the final output.

Now I see why people like to use specialised editors to write this 
stuff. ;-) Typing HTML by hand is trivial, but this stuff is just 
mental. (!)

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