On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The ideal solution for Wikipedia would be to move to a
system in which
users with relatively modern browsers don't see images at all. There
is already a candidate for that system: MathJax. This has extensive
browser compatibility [1] and is actively maintained, with some
big-name sponsors behind it [2]. The main difficulties enabling it on
WIkipedia would be configuration and checking for any inconsistencies
with texvc (so the main limitation is developer interest).
When I load their homepage, the formulas don't appear for about two
seconds of 100% CPU usage, on Firefox 4b9. And that's for two small
formulas. I'm not impressed. IMO, the correct way forward is to work
on native MathML support -- Gecko and WebKit both support it these
days, and Opera somewhat does too. I'm sure the support is a bit
spotty, but if Wikipedia used it (even as an off-by-default option)
that would surely drive a lot of progress. These days (with the
deployment of HTML5 parsers) it can be embedded directly into HTML,
it's not limited to XML.