
MathML is a failed web standard (2016) - auggierose
https://www.peterkrautzberger.org/0186/
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thanatropism
I don't understand what is wrong with TeX.

\- As a syntax/language for mathematics, it's the actual standard. Do you
think Terry Tao will bother learning some other language for his blog? You
might as well argue that English is poorly-specified and the web should switch
to Lojban.

\- As a layout engine, it encodes all the damn typographical conventions that
are in every single research article, academic journal and textbook. In the
world.

Trying to replace TeX is so quixotic it makes Urbit sound pragmatic and down-
to-earth. It's this whole scorched earth tradition. There just isn't any
mathematics out there that uses anything but TeX.

~~~
kxyvr
Alright, so I work as a mathematician and I'll strongly agree that there's not
good substitute for TeX at the moment for producing mathematical documents.
That said, I do periodically look for something better because it's far from
perfect. In large documents, I find it difficult to produce easily
maintainable mathematical statements since the macro situation in LaTeX is a
complete mess. Often times, I have a large formulation that I want to modify
only a small part. Now, yes, we could just number all of the equations, change
one of them, and then say that the result is the combination of (4), (27),
(43), and (45). In fact, we can link them, so that everyone could flip back to
these equations. That also makes really hateful to read documents. Really, I
want to display all of the equations and I don't want to retype them since I
may very well make a mistake and I want that correction propagated around the
document. So, we can use macros to help with this, but the definitions have to
occur before \begin{document}, which is not where I want to look for an
equation. I want a local definition since it's next to what I'm looking at. We
could use something like \newsavebox, which I often do, but I often want to
just make a reference to part of an equation and this is not a good solution
for that. Maybe there's a better macro or way to do that out there, and if
anyone knows, I'd love to hear. I could write my own macros, but, really, I
find TeX to be a difficult language to work with. I am curious to know if
LuaTeX makes this much easier to do and I've been meaning to experiment to
find out.

So, yes, in a vacuum I think that math notation in LaTeX works really, really
well. However, for a larger document, there's a lot of other features that
would be nice to have and they're difficult to implement in TeX.

~~~
gciruelos
i agree completely on the large document problem that LaTeX has, especially
when you have big formulas, statements or diagrams that are hard to parse
after you have written them and, say, you want to find where you committed a
syntax error or made a typo.

i think semantic macros really help with that, but they are not a silver
bullet. i'd really like to see editor plugins that convert LaTeX commands to
actual symbols (for example, as soon as you write the space after the q in
"\neq ", it gets converted to a "=/=", and when you type backspace to erase
the "=/=" you get "\ne"). that has been already implemented for languages like
agda, and in a simple form is present in text editors that support fonts with
ligatures.

i know that what i'm proposing more on the "wysiwyg" side (which some LaTeX
fundamentalists might dislike), but i think it would be a very nice thing to
have when editing complicated formulas or diagrams.

~~~
brians
It’s best, in my experience, for simple expressions. We usually have a lot of
those, and this helps it flow like text. Big expressions are so complex,you
really want to keep your eyes on the real input.

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mindcrime
Say what you want about MathML but as of now it's the best standard we have
for putting math on the web. And there seems to _finally_ be a little bit of
traction developing w/r/t getting MathML support into Chromium (and Chrome).

Consider that, as of Feb 14 2017, the "MathML support" issue was the #8 top
starred issue for Blink, Google finally seem to be paying a little bit of
attention to this.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606)

 _We (layout team and igalia) have a tentative plan to build a MathML
implementation on top of LayoutNG and Custom Layout. I 've marked this as
blocked on CSS Custom Layout and LayoutNG._

~~~
corndoge
Could you explain what makes in-browser MathML support better than rudimentary
support of LaTeX's math mode?

~~~
mindcrime
If you could get in-browser support for LaTeX, that would be great. It might
arguably be better than MathML. But do any browsers support that today, and is
there any initiative underway to get such support? If so, I'm not aware of it.
MathML, OTOH, is supported by Firefox, and _I think_ by Safari, and it there's
at least some reason to think Chrome may eventually add MathML support. Not
sure where Edge stands on this. But in either case, from a pragmatic
standpoint, I believe MathML is close to giving us quality "math on the web"
than anything else. That said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong if something
else is truly better positioned to do that.

~~~
whorleater
What's wrong with mathjax?

~~~
goatlover
The fact that you have to load a large javascript library to faithfully render
math equations. I ended up disabling it on my Jupyter notebook server because
of it's load time.

~~~
wenc
MathML rendering is unlikely to be significantly better in many use cases.

Besides, once MathJax is cached, it loads pretty fast.

~~~
Dylan16807
Load time, not rendering time. Code in the browser won't need to be compiled
over and over at runtime.

~~~
wenc
The render time is fairly fast on most modern browsers on desktop machines
(though there's much more variance on mobile devices for some reason).

For the most part, it's good enough for the professional mathematicians on
mathoverflow.net, where the math can get quite hairy. (I was active there many
years ago, and even then the render speed was better than acceptable)

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ungzd
It's very frustrating every time I'm trying to read some webpage via Pocket
app and it has formulas rendered with Mathjax (which is very popular because
MathML is failed and pre-rendering formulas as images requires complicated
tooling) and they don't work in Pocket.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444830).

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ausjke
true but we have a better alternative from Khan Academy:

[https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/](https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/)

~~~
fantispug
KaTeX suffers the same issues as MathJax; it has to render some subset of Math
LaTeX to something web browsers can render. We now have two standards. All the
CSS issues in the article apply as much to KaTeX as anything else.

------
devereaux
Yes, we need something better. The correct solution is to have Unicode
combining characters, as anything else will require a lot of separate work to
be properly supported.

To think about how Unicode combining characters could work, just look at what
Mathematica can do with just a few shotkeys: like ctrl-2, ctrl-- (ctrl-5),
ctrl-6, ctrl-7 etc.

The matching Unicode combination characters would respectively be: place under
a square root, put a something to the right below (and above), put an
exponent, put something over.

With these 6 combining characters, you could already solve a large part of the
problem and write 90% of the equations: for ex, if you want to type the sum of
i=1 to 10 of the square root of alpha to the k bar power:

Type: 𝚺 (ctrl--) i=1 (ctrl-5) 10 (ctrl-2) α (ctrl-6) k (ctrl-7) _

With a proper keymap or shortcuts support, you could write (and render)
equations just as fast as you write them by hand. I know, because I take all
my notes with Mathematica and the only "magic" I use beside Mathematica
combining shortkeys is a third level Unicode mapping for greek letters and
some mathematical symbol like infinity, so that AltGr a gives me alpha, AltGr
0 gives me infinity etc.

Also, unlike what you read above, where only sigma and alpha stand out, it
would show up in your browser, and you could copy-paste that in any email or
text forum -- like HN or reddit!! No need for MathML support, that would be
implemented straight in the Unicode rendering engine with the next batch of
Unicode changes.

I have been trying to get some people involved, to try to submit a Unicode
Math proposal. Nobody seems interested. Maybe with MathML dead, proper Unicode
math combining characters will have a better chance.

(NB: in the above, I do not use a combining over bar for k, even if that is
possible at the moment with what I think is called a macron. The idea is more
general - what if you want to write a letter instead of just a bar over k? we
have a few exponents like numbers and latin letters, but what if you want to
write greek letters to the top right corner?)

~~~
jean-
It's a neat idea, but I'm not entirely sold.

How would you implement, amongst others: vectors and matrices, matched auto-
sizing delimiters (\left and \right) \operatorname, \limits, \displaystyle,
\textstyle? In my line of work, every other line of maths I write requires at
least one of these LaTeX features.

Also: \underset / \overset, \underbracket / \overbracket

~~~
moultano
Those aren't terribly more complicated than some of the rendering in existing
languages. For instance ก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้

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tomtimtall
Weren't all of these issues solved with latex? Why do we need to start over
all for the purpose of making everything xml?

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agumonkey
What about VRML ? SMIL ?

~~~
dualogy
Yeah, these too. So? What about them?

~~~
agumonkey
two good old things that were forgotten

