Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
This is a follow up to "wikipedia is one of the
slower sites on the web".
In Math preferences what does the "Recommended for modern browsers"
option actually mean? I like to think of myself as someone who uses
modern browsers, so i select it on every MediaWiki site in which i
open an account, but i never seriously thought about its meaning
except fantasizing that it uses MathML, which it probably doesn't.
I also think that trying to select "MathML if possible" didn't change
anything for me (Firefox 3.6.8 on XP).
There's a question similar to mine at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Preferences since 2006.
The software used to render the math (texvc), catalogues the html it
outputs as conservative, moderate or liberal.
"Recommended for modern browsers" means "I can show any html but the
liberal one". That's also the option taken if you requested MathML but
it was unable to generate MathML for that equation.
"HTML if possible" means that it accepts even "liberal" HTML
(something
that should be able to do today's modern browsers...). Again, if there's
no html equivalence, you get an image.
"HTML if very simple" means that it only accepts "conservarive" HTML.
The other two options "Always render PNG" and "Leave it as TeX" are
self-explicative.