Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Reduce math rendering preferences 2

I have now notified the mathJax software developers of the existence of this present page and the one at this URL. I'd really like to see mathJax brought up to the state in which it can make sense to just force everyone who reads Wikipedia math articles to use mathJax. This page elicited some support for that. But it's a page for people discussing how to edit, develop, and maintain Wikipedia's math articles, not for software developers who can actually do something about the software. The software developers (both those who read pages like the present one and those who work on mathJax) need to know what the needs are from the point of view of the people who post to those pages. Robert Miner at mathJax.org, who is interested in supporting Wikipedia, now knows about the following pages, and so should everyone here:

• w:en:User_talk:Nageh/mathJax
• w:en:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics
• w:en:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2011/Jul
• this present page

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

On 25 June 2011, David Eppstein wrote in this discussion:

I would very much like to see mathjax become standard for Wikipedia math formatting, so that no special user-preference tweaking is required; it works well on the other sites I've used that use it (e.g. mathoverflow and mathscinet) and looks a lot better a lot more consistently than the alternatives.

It appears to me that would solve the problems everyone's been griping and arguing about on that discussion page since 2003, provided some bugs can be fixed. Bugs are listed at w:en:User_talk:Nageh/mathJax. Those need to get fixed by software people at mathJax.org, who are now aware of that page and are interested in Wikipedia's adopting David Eppstein's suggestion.

The other thing that would need to get done would be done by those who edit the software that Wikipedia uses.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

Just to make it clear: The mathJax user script currently relies on the "Leave it as TeX" rendering option. It would be easy to change this so the alt tag of the PNG output (setting "Always render PNG") would be processed... but it seemed a bit pointless to show images for fractions of a second just before they are replaced by MathJax output. This could be used as a fall-back for users that don't have JavaScript activated though I would suggest a more intelligent solution.

Now I remember: I had to choose "leave it as TeX" and also install a file called vector.js or something like that, which I copied from somewhere. So apparently if the "leave it as TeX" option isn't there, then mathJax won't work for me for now. Michael Hardy 17:08, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Re I'd really like to see mathJax brought up to the state in which it can make sense to just force everyone who reads Wikipedia math articles to use mathJax: please don't force people to use a particular technology: that goes against many principles underlying the web. By all means let's have it as a default once the bugs are ironed out, but I don't see a strong reason to remove the PNG and HTML options entirely; there will always be a few oddballs who want those things for one reason or another.

Everyone is "forced" to use certain technologies when they read any Wikipedia page or any web page. Even when there are several options and they can choose one as their preference from a menu, they're "forced" to use only those available in the menu. (But maybe making it the default is the right way to go.) Michael Hardy 23:48, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Can't we enable MathJax as a "beta" option, disabled by default? Is that a possibility?

This post was posted by Markovnikov~mediawikiwiki, but signed as Markovnikov.

So folks know: while one option is to have MathJax parse tex expressions and display them, it's also possible to produce mathml on the server side and have MathJax display it in the browser, which addresses the problem of browsers that can't display mathml themselves, while avoiding any quirks of MathJax's tex parsing.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

I would think the bigger quirks are with the MathML rendering as implemented in browsers. Even Firefox's implementation, which is supposedly the most complete implementation among browser, is missing essential functionality like negative spaces. As such, using MathJax to directly parse from the TeX source is still the better option.

Nageh - parsing TeX to MathML on the server and using MathJax to display the MathML, instead of the browser's MathML implementation, would also address the quirks issue to the same degree as your proposal, and might be more efficient because the MathML could be cached for reuse.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

I see what you mean. That is certainly a feasible solution as well, and would definitely render faster than typesetting from TeX.