On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
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.
Looking at http://www.mathjax.org/demos/tex-samples/ it may indeed take a couple of seconds to convert from TeX to the graphical view, but without 100% CPU usage or looking "blocked". I'm not using 49b but 3.6.12, though. I see a similar result in chromium. A disadvantage is that the showing the formula needs to reposition the content, instead of reserving the space in advance.
Delurking to say that while I don't know if it's useful for us at all, Mathjax is getting lots of buzz in other settings (like publishing and the science library world); and also I just today came across this http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
It's not directly applicable but it is a fun usability idea for turning symbols into LaTeX (and by extension I can imagine symbols to markup, letters to unicode, etc.)
-- phoebe