Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

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I use MathJax on one site I'm developing. It has two problems related to speed:

1. It is so modular that you cannot really optimize it using something like Google Closure (http://code.google.com/closure/ ). If you do, it breaks it.

2. The modularity means that you're likely to need a few roundtrips to the server to get everything. Invariably these block the loading of the page and you get a hang, sometimes for a few seconds. This is not good for user experience.

Of course MathJax solves a very important problem, but it's a problem browsers have introduced. None of the support MathML in a sane way: Firefox requires content served as fully valid XHTML (good luck with that if you're using a CMS) and Webkit only got MathML support recently in the nightly releases. If browsers actually implement MathML in a way developers can use without losing hair, then MathJax is no longer needed. Till then, I love MathJax despite its warts.

Firefox requires pages that use MathML, SVG, or any other markup that exists outside the HTML namespace to be presented in XML, because HTML4 doesn't have any way to declare that an element exists in a non-default namespace.

HTML5 doesn't have a way to declare specific namespaces either, but it does make special exceptions for including MathML and SVG elements in HTML content: putting a <math> or <svg> element in your HTML document creates an "island" of MathML or SVG markup:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

Firefox 4 includes an HTML5 parser by default, so your glorious future is one step closer.

Even if browsers would support MathML, humans like to write LaTeX, so MathJax is still useful to convert from LaTeX to MathML.

However, when you see the MathML rendering of Firefox, you immediately see why something like MathJax is still _required_. We would need widespread support for MathML rendering that is actually readable. That will take another while.

The appearance of MathML sadly depends on native fonts installed. If your user has STIX or Computer Modern fonts installed then MathML looks very readable compared to say Mathematica's typesetting.

What's wrong with Firefox's MathML rendering? The MathJax MathML example looks fine with Firefox 4 on Windows 7 (it seems to be using Cambria Math to render symbols).

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