On 14 okt. 2012, at 17:45, Moritz Schubotz <physik(a)physikerwelt.de> wrote:
Summary: I'm looking for people to discuss about
the parsing of math.
The last person who really did some work on the extension was Brion Vibber. Almost all of
the (limited) work that has gone into the extension over the last 1,5 year was actually
based on the efforts of User:Nageh on the English wikipedia and his MathJax userscript.
Beyond these MathJax changes, the extension has not seen much developer involvement for
quite some while.
I came up with a proposal for a new version of the
rendering of the
<math> tag. I proposed to use LaTeXML to convert the LaTeX expressions
in the math tag to MathML. If the browser is not capable of displaying
MathML I use MathJaX to display the MathML output in the browser.
My implementation (the LaTeXML branch) has only a few very little
differences in contrast to the master branch. I have the feeling that
the php code of the math extensions could be improved. For example I'd
suggest to put all the texvc related stuff to another class.
Furthermore I was thinking about an asynchronous rendering of the
formula, which would speed up page loading time especially for major
edits.
At
http://wiki.physikerwelt.de/images/text_math_search.pdf
you find the draft of a paper where I describe in detail what
I changed and why it is an improvement. The paper will appear soon in
the postconference proceedings of CICM2012.
Now I want to figure out, who is working on the development of the
math extension, and who wants to discuss with me about our ideas.
I'm open to any kind of suggestions and questions.
Discussion is always welcomed and in this case probably best on the mailinglist.
You seem to propose switching our current texvc -> image converter (by some users
extended by using MathJax) with a LaTeX -> MathML presentational renderer that would
use MathJax as a backup. The renderer would also output Content MathML to make the content
easier to index and search. In general I would support this, definitely morally.
There are however some problems here as well.
- If a browser does not support MathML and not support (have enabled) Javascript, you
would see nothing reading the article.
- Browser support for MathML is still spotty. It would be nice if we can gather some
actual numbers on this. There are apparently also significant bugs in rendering
implementations. I believe this is one of the reasons that the default of MathJax is
HTML+CSS now, and not MathML.
- You are determining support serverside right now ? This would require fragmenting the
cache when we move forward.
- I think that currently a large group of users would fall into your MathJax group.
Especially those with older browsers. However, we don't particularly like MathJax for
that usergroup. It is incredibly slow on the client side and this greatly affects the
userbase with less capable computers (of which we have quite a lot). This is one of the
main reasons why we are not particularly pushing for this solution as a default right now
(let alone as the primary backup method). I would seriously consider just skipping MathJax
(at least by default) and just show images for the fallback option.
- In order to provide proper MathML support, a proper font is required. Many Operating
Systems do not yet have this font support. This is something that possibly could be solved
with WebFonts, but will require a bit of work.
- MathML does not, I believe, provide everything that is possible with texvc. This is
another issue that we are currently seeing with MathJax, though we (Nagheh actually) has
added most of them to MathJax by now. For MathML the solution seems not so simple however.
This probably means we either need to phase out part of what we currently support (always
complicated) or fragment the implementation for these particular situations.
- I'm not aware of the current quality of LaTexML. Is there some information about the
'completeness' of the capabilities and quality of the implementation? Comparisons
with other implementations ? That would be useful information.
- Outputting both Presentational and Content MathML into the HTML will significantly
increase the page size.
- LaTeXML will have to be reviewed by one of the developers of the security team.
These would be the issues that I think would require assessment and solving at some point
before a full solution can be deployed on Wikipedia. But of course, we can just start and
expose the functionality at a later time.
DJ
P.S. Seems that MathJax 2.1 will be released soon:
http://www.mathjax.org/2012/10/01/news/mathjax-v2-1-beta-now-available-on-t…