Here are some of the most common ways in which WebEQ equations are used to interact with the reader. Equations can display messages, or highlighting part of an equation when the mouse moves over a specific part of an equation. Equations can have links to other HTML pages from specific areas, like an image map. Equations can toggle between two different displays when the reader click the mouse, e.g. to display an answer, or reveal additional terms in a sequence. Editable equations can let users modify or enter math expressions.
Equation can update when readers change values in a form, or click on buttons in a page.
Equations can be updated in real time by other active components in a page, such as an applet running a simulation, or an input control connecting to a computation engine on a server. Although the concept of dynamic math is relatively new, it is becoming much more prominent as more people use the World Wide Web to communicate. As math and science researchers and educators have begun to explore what is possible with new Web-based media, a huge variety of applications for dynamic math have started to appear. The techniques for using dynamic math in Web pages divide sharply between those that involve running programs of some sort on the server that return new pages, and those where the interactivity is self-contained within a single page. By contrast, more ambitious kinds of interactivity usually require programming of some sort, usually in the form of scripts running on a Web server.