David Harvey and others has been working hard on Blahtex, the next generation in MediaWiki math rendering technology. Visit http:// www.blahtex.org/ for more information and http://wiki.blahtex.org/go/ Main_Page for a running demo hosted by Jitse Niesen.
Harvey suggests that blahtex will afford a significant performance advantage, but the main impetus is the ability to render MathML. Support for MathML is not widespread at the moment, so the need for Blahtex is not urgent, but it is the future, and we have reason to believe that Wikipedia's adoption could goad browser developers to speed their efforts (the answer to the old chicken and egg of who comes first, browser support or use by web pages could be: Wikipedia comes first).
It has to happen someday, and today is as good a day as any. Harvey says the software is ready for the next step, and wants to move forward, but doesn't know whom to talk to in order to make this happen. I'm writing you to voice my full support for Harvey's and Niesen's efforts, to open up a dialogue and find out what needs to be done to take the next step towards rolling this software out, and to ask if there is anything I can do to help the developers to get this software ready for deployment.
Thanks lethe
I have submitted a bug report at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6383 for Blahtex deployment. I haven't heard from any developers what steps are next, which is disappointing, I would very much like to get this project moving. Is requesting CVS commit access for Harvey the right next step? Or do we have to wait until a lead developer has the time to review the code? Is there anything I can do to help?
Thanks lethe
On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, it was written:
David Harvey and others has been working hard on Blahtex, the next generation in MediaWiki math rendering technology. Visit http:// www.blahtex.org/ for more information and http://wiki.blahtex.org/go/ Main_Page for a running demo hosted by Jitse Niesen.
Harvey suggests that blahtex will afford a significant performance advantage, but the main impetus is the ability to render MathML. Support for MathML is not widespread at the moment, so the need for Blahtex is not urgent, but it is the future, and we have reason to believe that Wikipedia's adoption could goad browser developers to speed their efforts (the answer to the old chicken and egg of who comes first, browser support or use by web pages could be: Wikipedia comes first).
It has to happen someday, and today is as good a day as any. Harvey says the software is ready for the next step, and wants to move forward, but doesn't know whom to talk to in order to make this happen. I'm writing you to voice my full support for Harvey's and Niesen's efforts, to open up a dialogue and find out what needs to be done to take the next step towards rolling this software out, and to ask if there is anything I can do to help the developers to get this software ready for deployment.
Thanks lethe
lethe wrote:
I have submitted a bug report at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6383 for Blahtex deployment. I haven't heard from any developers what steps are next, which is disappointing, I would very much like to get this project moving. Is requesting CVS commit access for Harvey the right next step? Or do we have to wait until a lead developer has the time to review the code? Is there anything I can do to help?
Nobody's gotten to it, sorry.
I would like to see this in extensions SVN; send me a ssh public key and preferred username.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org