[Wikitech-l] RFC: Should we drop the rendering preferences for math?

[Brion Vibber]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:05 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
[snip my notes about removing the non-PNG non-source options, wanting
higher-resolution renderings]

> Did you have a chance to evaluate MathJax? <http://www.mathjax.org/> I
> know
> it's come up in past math discussions and that a lot of math folks think it
> looks promising. A technical analysis of its feasibility on Wikimedia wikis
> would be great. Killing the less-used, ancient math options is great, but
> perhaps adding one wouldn't be too bad to do too. :-)
>

That's an excellent thing to bring up -- MathJAX *does* look very
promising, and things seem to render pretty nicely. Need to make sure that
we can either do that type of rendering cleanly with the PNG fallback
(older browsers will still need the PNGs, so it may still be worth spending
the time to fix baselines).

Size of the library, and compatibility, could be an issue for mobile but is
worth checking on. (Looks like it *does* work in Android and iPhone
browsers, so has a good chance of being something we could use as a
progressive enhancement.)

It's actually probably a better idea to go ahead in that direction than to
worry about high-resolution renderings from texvc for now. (Other image
types, including icons in the UI, will still need high-resolution versions
though.)

-- brion