from Hacker News

MathML in Chromium

by aplaice on 3/9/19, 6:41 AM with 86 comments

• by fdej on 3/9/19, 12:00 PM

  I really wish browsers would just render formulas directly from TeX. Let me write <tex>\sqrt{1+x}</tex> or whatever. TeX is the de facto standard for writing mathematical formulas. That browsers don't render it natively just screams of NIH syndrome on the part of browser and web standards developers.

  MathML still hasn't caught on after two decades, for three reasons: 1) not working in all browsers; 2) even when it worked, the rendering was often buggy or plain ugly; 3) no one wants to write MathML directly.

  MathJax instantly solved all problems, which made it an overnight success. MathML might be able to overcome 1) and 2), but 3) should not be underestimated. MathJax will be around as long as it is the most convenient solution for showing equations in a browser (no user-side compilation required), and rendering times and network traffic will suffer accordingly.

• by est31 on 3/9/19, 10:39 AM

  It's very good news that this has finally started. Wikipedia, probably the biggest website that displays formulas, still renders them to SVG images.

  Igalia had already been improving WebKit's [1] MathML renderer and they had a fundraiser for the Chromium MathML work for a long time. Now they seem to collected enough to start with it. It's one of the great advantages of open source that a small company like Igalia can just go and improve multiple rendering engines used by billions of people.

  [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6803/improvements-in-mathml-renderin...

• by notthingnill on 3/9/19, 9:50 AM

  You can also use a computer algebra system (CAS) to perform computations and get the output in mathml, for example the free CAS maxima.

  wxMaxima is something like jupyter notebook but developed with wxWindows by a solo developer. ?? is help for command

  I just copy pasted:

  (%i2) ?? mathml; -- Function: mathml_display (<form>) Produces MathML output. (%i1) load("alt-display.mac")$ (%i2) set_alt_display(2,mathml_display); <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mi>mlabel</mi> <mfenced separators=""><msub><mi>%o</mi> <mn>2</mn></msub> <mo>,</mo><mi>done</mi> </mfenced> </math> (%o2) true

• by dtf on 3/9/19, 9:18 AM

  Here's an example of why MathML is attractive as a rendering layer (try Firefox vs Chrome, and look at native MathML latency vs MathJax emulation):

  https://runarberg.github.io/ascii2mathml/

  (it helps to have the LaTeX Computer Modern fonts installed locally, which for some reason aren't imported on this page)

• by bjoli on 3/9/19, 7:44 AM

  Not in any way affiliated, but Igalia is a cool company. They pay their employees to work on OSS projects as a part of their job. Andy Wingo work(ed?)there and they financed quite a bit of guile development as a way to make him develop his compiler and runtime skills.

• by sanxiyn on 3/9/19, 8:11 AM

  My personal opinion is that MathML should die. MathJax is here today and works.

• by 75dvtwin on 3/9/19, 11:42 AM

  this is great news.

  Does anybody know if this will translate to chromium based web toolkits (eg QT), and MS Edge (soon to be based on chromium), and therefore, React-XP [1] ?

  [1]https://github.com/Microsoft/reactxp

• by mymythisisthis on 3/10/19, 1:41 PM

  I hope MathML gets more support. It is a bit unwieldy, but it seems like a simple solution to displaying maths on a simple HTML page, here is my example.

  http://gron.ca/algebra/023.html