Jan Hidders wrote:

Toby Bartels wrote:

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(Contrary to popular opinion, I've never suggested $$x \le y$$.

Sorry for that, I started that rumour, it seemed like a logical generalization of your idea and as such not a bad suggestion.

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What I suggested was $$x$$ ≤ $$y$$, which won't fool any TeXer into thinking that it's actual TeX; the markup is merely *inspired* by TeX.

I would not be so sure: $$ *is* LaTeX mark-up.

Hence the inspiration. But ≤ is not, much less outside of math mode. One of the first things that a new TeXer learns is that the fastest way to an error is writing something like $x$ \le $y$. Of course, you're a TeXer too, so I should listen if you disagree, but *I* don't see how anybody will be fooled.

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The only thing that $$...$$ has over [[math:...]] is in the situation of a very short formula like a single letter, and there it's better to use <var> instead of a gif *anyway*.

I disagree strongly. That would mean that if I have a formula with one letter variables and two letter variables the first would be written as <var> and the second as TeX within the same text. Always using LaTeX will look better and is more consistent.

I don't see why we should expect somebody to have a graphical interface to read "Suppose that $$x$$ is a [[real number]]. Then ...". That's reasonable for "If $$\int_a^b f(x),dx$$ exists, ...", which is legible to hardly anybody except as a picture, but the first will be mighty annoying to read if a voice reader describes it as "image labelled "x"" or something.

There's another reason for having a simple method producing <var> and a complicated method producing a PNG by calling LaTeX. LaTeX is hardly more easy for a technophobe to learn than HTML, and we don't want them to think that they can't edit a math expression without learning LaTeX. Tell them that [[math:]] is this huge PITA (which can't be avoided with an integral) but that $$ is easy as pie.

-- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia-l@math.ucr.edu