I'm wondering if the lack of reactions so far is positive or negative.
It's negative, it shows that few people have the confidence to think they have something worthwhile to contribute on this niche area. :(
Output: I'd love to support MathML as primary direction, but I still see huge problems there. These problems are mostly in browser and OS support.
I'm in favor of Wikipedia 'taking lead' in this, icw. a fallback strategy. The best fallback strategy is likely images. MathJax is nice for Math fans, but for a large part of our casual users a total nightmare to load, so I would not favor that for anything other than opt in.
Besides that, the biggest problem I see is in symbol consistency. If STiX would get their act together and focus on what is important, then this problem likely would have been solved already about 3 years ago.
So what I would actually propose for the short term (next few years) in case we really want to go the direction of MathML is the following: 1: img tag + --data-math=formulaID in HTML 2: script to detect MathML support in browser 3: script retrieves MathML DOM from API using formulaID 4: script replaces img with MathML
Script can have opt-in for MathML + MathJax. It's not optimal, it's slow, it possibly won't be indexed by Google, but it's a small step forward in a way that works, and importantly, without bothering too much the people who really just don't care about it. Of course it would require something like LatexML to drive the MathML generation.
If successful, we can switch to including both MathJax AND img's into the HTML, using JS/CSS to reveal MathML for browsers that support it. And then hopefully in about 10 years or so (Yes I really think it will take that long) we can remove the img mode.
Input: I don't think we should get away from TeX in the immediate future. I do see us replacing texvc however at some point. texvc is outdated and hard to maintain. If someone would hand us an improved Tex -> PNG renderer with proper glyph support, we would jump ship in a heartbeat I presume. There is actually quite a bit of cleanup work we could do on texvc itself. The problem there is mostly that it requires you to be fluent in a gazillion things (ocaml, math, latex, php, mediawiki, image conversion, server configuration).
DJ
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:05 PM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.orgwrote:
As a(nother) user, I have been very pleased to see unicode-complete fonts gradually make the use of images for non-roman orthography gradually disappear. When I see non-English text on a page, greek letters, or simple expressions with super- and sub-scripts, I can generally highlight, style, and copy-and-paste it. This is a huge win.
I would hope that the *long term* direction of math is in the same direction, even if *short term* some users would like to see better image-based renders. --scott
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