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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I wish MathML was better supported :(

IIRC, chrome intentionally decided not to add support for MathML, but it looks like they may have changed their mind (https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5240822173794304)?

Although, to be honest I'd rather have support for something closer to LaTeX. MathML is incredibly verbose, and certainly not something you would want to write by hand.

Despite MathML being too verbose, if it were well supported across all major web browsers, we could write mathematical content in LaTeX or another syntax and then convert it to MathML. It would have been very similar to how a lot of content is written in Markdown these days and then converted to HTML.

You should think of MathML like SVG. Most people use equation editors (a la Inkscape for SVGs) or a library (d3) that outputs MathML that you can include in your website. You also have the option to write simple equations by hand, but most people won’t.

The verbosity of MathML also has costs in terms of bandwidth (although that is mitigated by compression) and likely parsing speed.

Actually MathML is much simpler to parse: it's already parsed, what you get is basically an AST in XML.

That's a problem for mathml. The more required tooling, the less likely it is to be used. TeX hits this weird sweet spot between writing code and writing a document that's very productive.

Then use a library that converts TeX into MathML. I can recommend TeXZilla[1] (the author is also a major contributor to the MathML stadard).

    <p>
      The triangle inequality states that
      <la-tex>z \leq x + y</la-tex>.
    </p>

Disclosure: I am my self an author of an alternative library MathUp[2].

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

2: https://runarberg.github.io/mathup/

That still requires more tooling.

It is a little unfair since LaTeX has tons of extra libraries involved. It’s probably been more than 5 years since I touched LaTeX, but I usually (if I remember correctly) used amsmath, babel, biblatex, inputenc, fontenc, hyperref before I even started.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask authors that insist on writing in familiar syntax, that they use a tool that enables that. With native MathML authors are free to use whichever tool chain they prefer. Some authors will prefer graphical editing of equations, so they have their authoring tools set up that way. Others will just want to write their familiar latex syntax so they’ll put a:

    <script src="./path/to/texzilla.js"></script>

in their document and write as before.

looks like someone is sponsoring it:

https://mathml.igalia.com/

An above post mentioned it is actually not google implementing it, but Igalia:

https://mathml.igalia.com/

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