2009/3/18 lee worden wonder@riseup.net:
Attached is a patch for the skins directory that allows changing the Content-type dynamically. After applying this patch, if any code sets the global $wgServeAsXHTML to true, the page will be output with the xhtml+xml content type. This seems to work fine with the existing MW XHTML pages.
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This has been done before, for instance in the ASCIIMath4Wiki extension [2]. I don't want to change the Content-type unconditionally, though, only some of the time, so that we can serve texvc-style images to browsers or users that don't like the modified content type.
Note that this will interfere with any kind of HTML caching, such as Squid or file cache, and with the parser cache as well. It won't work correctly in most well-configured MediaWiki installs unless you make sure to fragment the parser cache appropriately, at a minimum.
The patch is made on the 1:1.13.3-1ubuntu1 mediawiki package (from Ubuntu 9.04), and only modifies Monobook.php and Modern.php. There are other skins in my installation here, but they don't seem to work very well and I didn't see where to make the change.
Well, that's okay for a first stab at the implementation, if we want to include this at all (hard to say without seeing the patch). Not your fault our skin system is a complete mess. There are likely to be some merge conflicts, though -- 1.13 is very old. It's best to submit patches based on trunk.
Is there a better way to make MathML work in MW? Might this option be included in a future MW release? Any feedback or alternative suggestions is welcome.
Under "Math" in preferences on Wikipedia, there's already a "MathML if possible (experimental)" option. I'm not sure if it actually does anything, though . . . if not, I guess it should be removed.