MathML was never intended to be written by hand any more than SVG was. It was designed to provide a standard output format for equation editors. Wolfram created

MathML was never intended to be written by hand any more than SVG was. It was designed to provide a standard output format for equation editors. Wolfram created MathML explicitly to prevent TeX from being adopted as a defacto standard on the web because TeX, being concerned only with visual appearance, does not do a good job of describing the structure or semantics of equations. MathML excels in both these areas, providing a fairly simple and standardised visual model which fits well with web browsers, and a rich semantic model. In other words, MathML is great and it's a much better fit for web browsers than anything else on offer. Just don't write it by hand!