On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sounds like someone should propose MathJax as a gadget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals
That solves some of the problems, but making it a gadget isn't technically very different from just putting it in user javascript.
Not all the MathJax files are javascript: there are also web fonts and fallback image fonts. Ideally these would be served from Wikimedia servers. The system they are using right now loads them from off-site somewhere, and that would not be fixable by the gadget system. Users can also install the fonts locally but that is not a good solution for a widespread roll-out.
The ideal implementation would be a system that detects whether the user has javascript enabled and a decent browser, and if so rolls them over to MathJax automatically. Users who fail that test or who intentionally opt out would receive images only. This would completely replace the current system (but re-use texvc to make the images).
This system would not be hard to implement, but there is little incentive for anyone to spend time on it without some pre-commitment from the site admins to make it live. If we just want something that users can opt in to get, we already have that.
- Carl