Comment by aplaice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aplaice | Hacker News Reader

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Will the developers of Chromium and Edge perhaps reconsider incorporating native support for MathML in light of this, considering that apparently people do use maths on the web?

180 million monthly users is a significant portion of the world's population. I'm not sure to what extent MathJax is cached, so it's possible that these are not 180 million unique users. On the other hand, this does not include all those self-hosting MathJax, using KaTeX or just using server-generated images (for example Wikipedia†).

†It's possible to force Wikipedia to use native MathML (which, at least on Firefox, looks really nice) or MathJax, but it's non-trivial.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-dev...

Yeah; I'm quite surprised, particularly given both Google's and Microsoft's push into the education market, that there is still not solution for this. MS certain has the edge (pardon the pun) with its maths tools in Word and Onenote, but lacking on the web. And that Google has given absolutely no consideration to this with Docs/Drive and related tools means that my school can't switch exclusively to G-Suite, and need to keep MS tools (and have to deal with installations and licensing) around.

People use math, but they use it with Latex not MathML, MathML is too verbose, so even if browsers implemented it people would need libraries like MathJax.

Nothing is stopping you from authoring your math however you like as long as there are tools that support the translation[1]:

[1]: http://fred-wang.github.io/TeXZilla/

I don't think that LaTeX is a significant competitor of MathML, just like markdown isn't a competitor to HTML. If you're writing something for the web, you're highly unlikely to be directly inputting HTML, whether it's on Wikipedia, StackOverflow or Hacker News, so you'll need some sort of server-side processor or a javascript library previewer, anyway.

Native (browser) support of MathML is far more convenient for the reader and not more cumbersome for the writer.

I wish people used LaTeX.

I only get "what's that?" most of the time.

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