On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipedia@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.