On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 01:44:12AM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
Why not render TeX directly? Because the MathML "bottleneck" will ensure that everyone sees the same thing, and it also provides a way to move eventually to supporting native MathML in the source, when MathML is a mature, editable, format in most browsers.
Unless you plan to move to a MathML-only solution on the short term, say two years or so, I don't see the point of such a dual system. It would make things more complex than necessary. If you only render TeX then everything also looks the same to everybody and you have the benefit of a notation that is easier to read and write. The only drawback I see is that you need to install TeX and that gif's don't scale when people use different font sizes but if you look on www.planetmath.org you can see that it works even then quite well.
Really, your enthousiasm is greatly appreciated but accesability is quite important for Wikipedia, so even if Mozilla & IE would fully support MathML then I doubt that it would switch to a MathML-only set up.
-- Jan Hidders