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I get the impression this is a tool made by technologists for technologists, rather than for people who spend a lot of time typesetting math. Academics (mathema
by chobytes 5y ago
I get the impression this is a tool made by technologists for technologists, rather than for people who spend a lot of time typesetting math. Academics (mathematicians, physicists, etc) don't have the same concerns as technologists, and the specifics of browser tech in particular are't relevant.
Latex is basically the mathematical (computer) lingua franca right now. Theres an entire cultural and technological ecosystem around latex thats been built up for many years. We even message each in latex notation when rendering isn't available! Theres decades of documentation online. Most important of all, its dead easy to use for most use cases!
Perhaps MathML is technically superior in some ways, but none that the people typesetting math are concerned with. That this is browser oriented tech in particular is already a disadvantage, as the browser is not a priority to us. In this way mathjax feels like the superior tool for users. It attempts to work with users rather than dictating to them.
- throwaway4857 5y agoI think MathML might not have failed so hard if it weren't so ludicrously verbose and time-consuming to type compared to TeX notation. XML apologists generally propose special editors to make the experience less unpleasant, but that's not what working users of mathematics want. TeX notation provides a way for us to type formulae in plain text form, anywhere that ascii is accepted, as fast as we can type normal text. That's the bare minimum required for any representation to be relevant to mathematicians and physicists. I don't know what a more 'web flavoured' notation satisfying this constraint would look like. (Are web standards people even capable of brevity?)
- chobytes 5y agoYeah thats very true and I didnt think to mention it. I very much appreciate how concise latex is, and that I don't need any special editor for it.