14. The computer-implemented method as recited in claim 10 , wherein the component description file includes at least one of mathematic markup language or a Uniform Resource Locator.
10. A computer-implemented method for authoring a live component for one or more displayable equation elements having user-edited format characteristics, the method comprising: receiving a live component comprising a viewer module and a component description file, wherein the viewer module and component description file define a set of displayable equation elements; displaying a subset of the displayable equation elements in an editing browser interface; receiving user input to the editing browser interface, causing: invocation of at least one rule in a pre-built application, the pre-built application included in the viewer module, and the invoked at least one rule related to editing the format of equation elements, wherein the at least one rule edits the format of at least one element in the displayed subset of the displayable equation elements to indicate a new format for edited elements; and generation and display, based on the invoked at least one rule, of the edited elements including the indicated new format; receiving edited displayable equation elements from the editor and modifying the live component by changing the component description file to include items describing the content and the modified format of the edited displayable equation elements; wherein the live component, after being modified, is executable on a server or downloadable to a local system to display a component with the content and the modified format of the edited displayable equation elements according the changed component description file, or to further edit the format of the live component using rules from the pre-built application module in the viewer module.