

Ask HN: Why is WolframAlpha serving rendered text images instead of plain text? - esonica

I am after some thoughts on why they would be doing this. I am a developer/designer and cannot think of any good reason for doing what can be done in CSS. Any ideas?<p>Sample : http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi63ebi5b100001e27378a70be39cd?MSPStoreType=image/gif&#38;s=46<p>* srry, for unclickable link
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aaronsw
I asked Stephen Wolfram about this and he explained that it was because
sometimes the answers contain complex mathematical formulae that are difficult
to render in HTML and that since he wanted a consistent display, his preferred
solution was to just use images all the time.

~~~
Herring
Wikipedia occasionally has complex mathematical formulae & it seems to be
working fine. This isn't a hard problem.

~~~
andylei
those formulae are rendered as images

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wlievens
... whereas text is rendered as text, is his point. But I understand the
original explanation. It's all Mathematica, so it makes sense to let
Mathematica format it and then spit it out as images.

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chris24
How strange... from their FAQ (under Web and other Practicalities -
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/faqs.html>):

"Do I need images enabled in my browser to use Wolfram|Alpha?

Yes. All its output content is rendered as images, for consistency."

Perhaps they didn't want to make sure the data was styled & displayed well in
all browsers (ahem... ie6)?

clickable:
[http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi6...](http://www4d.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP6202195gdebi63ebi5b100001e27378a70be39cd?MSPStoreType=image/gif&s=46)

~~~
nimbix
While consistency is a good thing, it comes at a relatively high price in this
case. Many blocks could be rendered just fine using only HTML and I'd be a
much happier user if I could copy text from the search results.

~~~
chris24
Indeed. FYI, if you click on any text in the search results, you're given a
text field with its text within it. It's a few extra clicks, unfortunately,
but at least they considered that.

~~~
nimbix
Did they just add that now? I don't remember seeing the hand cursor over text
fields a couple of hours ago.

~~~
rms
It was there yesterday

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Skeuomorph
Perhaps they don't want other search engines 'learning' the questions (via
phrases hyperlinked to wolfram) and displaying the answers as summary text?

~~~
Scriptor
Again, the text of each image can be found in the image element's alt
attribute. Since WA already uses images to make formulas easier to print out,
I guess Wolfram simply wanted to reuse the code.

~~~
Skeuomorph
Turns out, Google is indexing the questions:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wolframalpha.com+inurl:i...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wolframalpha.com+inurl:input&hl=en&filter=0&cad=h)

The "meaning of life" and "the ultimate answer" questions feature highly. But
even more people seem curious about "unemployment rate in USA".

The answers are not in Google's summary.

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auston
I don't know for sure - but my guess is mathematica outputs images?

~~~
Skeuomorph
This guess makes the most sense: to correctly display formulae. An example
from another thread:

<http://imgur.com/gcymm.png>

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kailoa
I'd assume that not everything that WA puts out will be text or tables.
They've got graphs, complex mathematical formulas, general purpose image
manipulation and who knows what else.

It may have made sense to "unify" the rendering engine. This makes the simple
case you point out look silly of course.

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wdr1
I don't know if I buy the consistency answer. There's ways to do that (even
with complicated formula), but it is an interesting way to avoid x-browser CSS
issues.

My own hunch is they did it to avoid scraping/botting. Hopefully they switch
to text at some point in the future.

~~~
andylei
> My own hunch is they did it to avoid scraping/botting

the text is in the alt attribute of the image. easily scraped.

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jonknee
Pretty pathetic as it breaks the site for people with less than perfect
vision. I mean they obviously take advantage of machine readable data to
populate their database, pretty lame to not spit it back out. Not to mention a
huge server overhead--this was a calculated decision.

~~~
Scriptor
Don't most screen readers read out the alt text of an image? (Yes, the hint
here is to check the alt text of the image).

~~~
jonknee
There are tons of people who simply increase the text size in their browser.
Can't do that with WA. They aren't blind, just older.

~~~
Scriptor
Most modern browsers can also increase the size of the image with the text.

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wmoxam
We actually do the same for math equations in LearnHub lessons (via
texhub.com). Images are pretty much the only way to present complex math
equations to a wide audience.

MathML would be a much better solution only if it were natively supported in
IE.

~~~
PaulTopping
Our free MathPlayer plugin for IE enables it to display MathML. Except for
having to be installed, it is as "native" as it can get. It even works with
screen readers to speak the math for those that need that. See
<http://www.dessci.com/mathplayer>.

~~~
wmoxam
Thanks Paul. I'm aware of Math Player, but I don't like the tradeoff of
forcing our users to install a plugin for superior display
quality/customizability vs. "it just works". The nature of our user base just
doesn't make it feasible IMO.

I would be more willing to take that tradeoff in a LCMS environment though.

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pj
The special font may not be on every user's computer. Which font is that?

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old-gregg
To make you pay for the API.

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esonica
its not like they hide the text that much though;

jsonArray.popups.i_0100_1 = {"stringified": "Brisbane,Queensland","mInput":
"","mOutput": "", "popLinks": {"Brisbane, Queensland":"Brisbane"} };

~~~
nimbix
Each image tag also has its source data embedded in its alt attribute.

