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Could you explain what makes in-browser MathML support better than rudimentary support of LaTeX's math mode?

mindcrime 9y ago
If you could get in-browser support for LaTeX, that would be great. It might arguably be better than MathML. But do any browsers support that today, and is there any initiative underway to get such support? If so, I'm not aware of it. MathML, OTOH, is supported by Firefox, and I think by Safari, and it there's at least some reason to think Chrome may eventually add MathML support. Not sure where Edge stands on this. But in either case, from a pragmatic standpoint, I believe MathML is close to giving us quality "math on the web" than anything else. That said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong if something else is truly better positioned to do that.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  Since the advent of MathJax, the best bet for anyone wanting to present maths on the web has been to write the text in LaTeX and then render with MathJax. The result is that there is a large set of existing web-sites around that have LaTeX source and not MathML source. No I am no JavaScript fan, and would be very glad if mathse were supported natively in web rendering toolkits. But at least mathjax does gives some sort of workable solution: wehere "workable" means "users can read it" and "authors can write it". MathML, being unsupported by Chrome fails first thing, and MathML fails the second thing by design, because it was never really meant to be human editable.
- whorleater 9y ago
  What's wrong with mathjax?
  - goatlover 9y ago
    The fact that you have to load a large javascript library to faithfully render math equations. I ended up disabling it on my Jupyter notebook server because of it's load time.
    - wenc 9y ago
      MathML rendering is unlikely to be significantly better in many use cases. Besides, once MathJax is cached, it loads pretty fast.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        Load time, not rendering time. Code in the browser won't need to be compiled over and over at runtime.
        wenc 9y ago
        The render time is fairly fast on most modern browsers on desktop machines (though there's much more variance on mobile devices for some reason). For the most part, it's good enough for the professional mathematicians on mathoverflow.net, where the math can get quite hairy. (I was active there many years ago, and even then the render speed was better than acceptable)
- corndoge 9y ago
  So just current state of adoption? Kinda lame but such is progress I suppose
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
TeX is a macro language which makes it non trivial to debug. The output is generated in a non-obvious way from loosely structured input. That being said, TeX math markup is a superior, human friendly format suitable for input to a translator that outputs MathML just as most people aren't writing web page content directly in HTML.

If you could get in-browser support for LaTeX, that would be great. It might arguably be better than MathML. But do any browsers support that today, and is there any initiative underway to get such support? If so, I'm not aware of it. MathML, OTOH, is supported by Firefox, and I think by Safari, and it there's at least some reason to think Chrome may eventually add MathML support. Not sure where Edge stands on this. But in either case, from a pragmatic standpoint, I believe MathML is close to giving us quality "math on the web" than anything else. That said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong if something else is truly better positioned to do that.

adrianratnapala 9y ago
Since the advent of MathJax, the best bet for anyone wanting to present maths on the web has been to write the text in LaTeX and then render with MathJax. The result is that there is a large set of existing web-sites around that have LaTeX source and not MathML source. No I am no JavaScript fan, and would be very glad if mathse were supported natively in web rendering toolkits. But at least mathjax does gives some sort of workable solution: wehere "workable" means "users can read it" and "authors can write it". MathML, being unsupported by Chrome fails first thing, and MathML fails the second thing by design, because it was never really meant to be human editable.
whorleater 9y ago
What's wrong with mathjax?
- goatlover 9y ago
  The fact that you have to load a large javascript library to faithfully render math equations. I ended up disabling it on my Jupyter notebook server because of it's load time.
  - wenc 9y ago
    MathML rendering is unlikely to be significantly better in many use cases. Besides, once MathJax is cached, it loads pretty fast.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      Load time, not rendering time. Code in the browser won't need to be compiled over and over at runtime.
      - wenc 9y ago
        The render time is fairly fast on most modern browsers on desktop machines (though there's much more variance on mobile devices for some reason). For the most part, it's good enough for the professional mathematicians on mathoverflow.net, where the math can get quite hairy. (I was active there many years ago, and even then the render speed was better than acceptable)
corndoge 9y ago
So just current state of adoption? Kinda lame but such is progress I suppose

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

TeX is a macro language which makes it non trivial to debug. The output is generated in a non-obvious way from loosely structured input. That being said, TeX math markup is a superior, human friendly format suitable for input to a translator that outputs MathML just as most people aren't writing web page content directly in HTML.