Erik Zachte wrote:
Several people complained about this vote being too technical. Actually the vote is mainly about usability.
What syntax would you find easiest to use or even only to recognize when editing an article. Nothing technical about that.
That is true. Nevertheless, it seems that so far mostly technically-minded people have voted. I suppose the less technically-minded people (a) don't really quite get what this is about (b) don't care enough to read the huge bulk of arguments for and against everything.
It is not uncommon for less technically-minded people to stay out of this kind of thing and blindly trust the "higher-ups". It is also not uncommon for them to have no real idea which option they will like better once it goes into actual production use. In fact, most people probably just take things like <math> for granted the way they are and aren't really consciously aware of the fact that they can influence it.
The vote therefore has a systemic bias towards the programmers, but they are not the intended audience. Also, most of the programmers (apparently) vote on what they prefer (as opposed to what they think unsavvy people might prefer).
There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever. Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than <math>.
Timwi