Hello hackers,
I have just taken a look at some Wikimedia pages, and it struck me as odd that inline math was rendered without attention to the baseline.
If you are running your equations through LaTeX, I'd strongly suggest taking a look at the preview.sty package: this package will make it possible to produce either DVI files (for processing with dvipng, _very_ fast), PostScript or PDF files (through LaTeX/dvips or PDFLaTeX) with tight bounding boxes (using the "tightpage" option).
If you use the "lyx" option to preview.sty, the respective image information _including_ the baseline info will be written to the log file and to standard output from which it is easy to parse it.
Alternatively, you can tell dvipng to output height and depth information when converting from dvi to PNG files. This info, again, can easily be parsed.
As a result, you can produce appropriate image alignment tags that will make inline math produced with TeX align perfectly with its surroundings.
And this stuff is _fast_, very much so if you use dvipng.
preview-latex URL:http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net uses it as the base for WYSIWYG editing of LaTeX in Emacs windows, and it works comfortably with large documents on slow processors.