4 ms·

> MathJax internal buffer size exceeded; is there a recursive macro call? That is so informative. Seriously though, wouldn't one expect the authors of this sp

> MathJax internal buffer size exceeded; is there a recursive macro call? That is so informative. Seriously though, wouldn't one expect the authors of this spec to be experts on web technologies who eat their own dog food (of web standards) instead of relying on a pale imitation of a dated typesetting technology like TeX?

diggan 3y ago
Rather than jumping to conclusions, maybe a more favorable position would be to try to look into what's happening, before judging what others are doing/not doing? FWIW, it works perfectly fine for me on Linux with both Chrome and Firefox, so I'd say probably something is wonky in your environment, or a temporary issue on the website.
- burke 3y ago
  Even when it works (I’ve never seen this failure), this site is offensively unusable. Anchors don’t go to useful places; search doesn’t work in the MathJax regions… the writing also does a fairly poor job of communicating details in many cases. It’s really a truly terrible spec site.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    The WASM spec ended up being a poor compromise between 'executable spec' (i.e. writing the spec entirely in ocaml or in a theorem prover language) and 'human readable spec' (i.e. the JavaScript or C# specs).
mike_hock 3y ago
> dated typesetting technology like TeX You seem to be confusing "mature" with "dated."
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  No, I am not. TeX, by itself, really shows its age, and how it was built as a "a faster horse" rather than hypertext's automobile: - despite the window dressing of LaTeX, it is ultimately presentation-oriented instead of structure-oriented; many widely-used forms of formatting markup rely on precise character dimensions and positioning; changing page dimensions may sometimes require fixes throughout the whole document - bad character set support: things like \mathcal{3} displays the wrong character WITH ZERO WARNING: see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ and duplicates - parsing is undecidable; the parser can be arbitrarily reconfigured at runtime, and can perform Turing-complete computations, which means processing arbitrary TeX code in any other way than to execute it as written is next to impossible; even a 100% correct syntax highlighter is unachievable MathJax fixes or ameliorates some of these flaws, but in trying to be compatible with TeX, it cannot avoid all of them; and in the meantime, it imposes its own syntax quirks and burdens the client with running bloated JavaScript, incurs significant pop-in latency, and leaves indecipherable mess of TeX code to clients which do not run JS. TeX is just PDF that's easier to edit, and MathJax is the Cufon of math markup. (Remember Cufon? Be thankful if you don't. Good riddance!)
  - pests 3y ago
    What is the relevance for the stack exchange post? User was using \cal, they told him to use \mathcal. Or is it an issue still or?
    - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
      The point is not in the mistake the user made, but how that error manifests. Subsequent punctuation characters that were not intended to be displayed in a different font are not kept as-is, nor do they trigger warnings like "character not present in font", but are instead substituted by random other characters. This is 1970s' "you're holding it wrong" error-handling philosophy, same one as C's. And yet Knuth seems to regard Unicode not as a basic building block of interoperability, but as useless bells-and-whistles, judging by his satirical "iTeX" presentation.
RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
On the contrary: static documentation rendered via complex client-side code, producing seconds of visible pop-in and an atrocious user experience is entirely in line with the ethos of people who thought the web needed a more developer-convenient way of dumping huge opaque blobs of cross-compiled code into pages.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  Point taken, I should have realized.
- pests 3y ago
  Why create the document once on the server, when you can have your users generate it on-demand, on their device, every time they load the page! Imagine the cost savings.
marwis 3y ago
Strange choice to use MathJax when much better alternatives exist like KaTeX

diggan 3y ago

Rather than jumping to conclusions, maybe a more favorable position would be to try to look into what's happening, before judging what others are doing/not doing? FWIW, it works perfectly fine for me on Linux with both Chrome and Firefox, so I'd say probably something is wonky in your environment, or a temporary issue on the website.

burke 3y ago
Even when it works (I’ve never seen this failure), this site is offensively unusable. Anchors don’t go to useful places; search doesn’t work in the MathJax regions… the writing also does a fairly poor job of communicating details in many cases. It’s really a truly terrible spec site.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  The WASM spec ended up being a poor compromise between 'executable spec' (i.e. writing the spec entirely in ocaml or in a theorem prover language) and 'human readable spec' (i.e. the JavaScript or C# specs).

mike_hock 3y ago

> dated typesetting technology like TeX You seem to be confusing "mature" with "dated."

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
No, I am not. TeX, by itself, really shows its age, and how it was built as a "a faster horse" rather than hypertext's automobile: - despite the window dressing of LaTeX, it is ultimately presentation-oriented instead of structure-oriented; many widely-used forms of formatting markup rely on precise character dimensions and positioning; changing page dimensions may sometimes require fixes throughout the whole document - bad character set support: things like \mathcal{3} displays the wrong character WITH ZERO WARNING: see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ and duplicates - parsing is undecidable; the parser can be arbitrarily reconfigured at runtime, and can perform Turing-complete computations, which means processing arbitrary TeX code in any other way than to execute it as written is next to impossible; even a 100% correct syntax highlighter is unachievable MathJax fixes or ameliorates some of these flaws, but in trying to be compatible with TeX, it cannot avoid all of them; and in the meantime, it imposes its own syntax quirks and burdens the client with running bloated JavaScript, incurs significant pop-in latency, and leaves indecipherable mess of TeX code to clients which do not run JS. TeX is just PDF that's easier to edit, and MathJax is the Cufon of math markup. (Remember Cufon? Be thankful if you don't. Good riddance!)
- pests 3y ago
  What is the relevance for the stack exchange post? User was using \cal, they told him to use \mathcal. Or is it an issue still or?
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    The point is not in the mistake the user made, but how that error manifests. Subsequent punctuation characters that were not intended to be displayed in a different font are not kept as-is, nor do they trigger warnings like "character not present in font", but are instead substituted by random other characters. This is 1970s' "you're holding it wrong" error-handling philosophy, same one as C's. And yet Knuth seems to regard Unicode not as a basic building block of interoperability, but as useless bells-and-whistles, judging by his satirical "iTeX" presentation.

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago

On the contrary: static documentation rendered via complex client-side code, producing seconds of visible pop-in and an atrocious user experience is entirely in line with the ethos of people who thought the web needed a more developer-convenient way of dumping huge opaque blobs of cross-compiled code into pages.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
Point taken, I should have realized.
pests 3y ago
Why create the document once on the server, when you can have your users generate it on-demand, on their device, every time they load the page! Imagine the cost savings.

marwis 3y ago

Strange choice to use MathJax when much better alternatives exist like KaTeX