Axel Boldt wrote:
by blindly executing TeX when someone edits a page, we are assuming that they haven't included any malicious code in their TeX source.
TeX has two dangerous commands: shell escapes and writing to an arbitrary file. Both can be globally disabled (and are disabled by default in most TeX distributions). It is fairly easy however to write TeX which eats memory like crazy (TeX allows recursion :-), so we would have to somehow restrict the resources available to the TeX process. But we are of course right now already wide open to all sorts of denial-of-service attacks.
Axel
Hey guys,
would using MathML (an XML language for description of mathematic formulas) be an option?
I am not part of the math community, but I could imagine that a good part of the people who are either already use tools that produce MathML or they know the syntax from the top of their hads.
There are probably also tools around that allow for automated rendering of images from a MathML formulae.
Mozilla even provides an editor for MathML. See http://www.newmexico.mackichan.com/MathML/mathmled.htm
Marian