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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

I think the nearly 25 year effort spent on MathML should have been put towards standardizing browser engines natively rendering LaTeX à la MathJax. The initial vision of MathML was that people would write it in a WYSIWYG editor (since it’s far too verbose to write by hand), but that grossly misjudged users’ preferences—LaTeX is the lingua franca of mathematical typesetting, and people much prefer writing (and reading) LaTeX. Realizing this over a decade(!) after MathML was first introduced in 1998, the MathML community has since focused some of their efforts on LaTeX conversion, which raises the question: why not just focus on rendering LaTeX directly, rather than translating it to (and maintaining standards for) a clunky intermediary format no human will ever directly read or write?

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TeX is a programming language, and a quite peculiar one at that (it's not possible to parse it without executing it, for example); while MathML is merely descriptions of mathematical expressions.

The idea of having native support for describing mathematics that the browser can render is not so crazy. On the other hand, MathML is sadly based on XML, which is an abomination that can't "decide" whether it should be human- or computer-readable, so it ends up being none, as opposed to S-expression-like formats which are both. But, at the end, SVG and HTML are already in the same (SGML?) family, so it might not be so bad that MathML belongs there, too.

> it's not possible to parse it without executing it, for example

It’s possible to define useful subsets of LaTeX (e.g. math markup only) for which this is not the case. MathJax does just that, in fact.

Actually, in SGML (but not the XML subset of SGML) it's common to define char sequences (shortrefs) an SGML parser would replace into tags, which together with tag inference (also left out from XML) can make it possible to at least type casual and high school math naturally as ASCII math expressions and have those render into presentational MathML. Though that approach clearly has limitations (fraction style, roots, infix expressions, etc.). It's also conceivable to attempt to customize SGML's concrete syntax to recognize LaTeX (but not TeX proper) such that it treats "\bla{...}" as <bla>...</bla>, etc.

But the fact that nobody had bothered probably tells us it's not all that useful.

Having MathML being XML based plays rather nicely with both HTML and SVG. And I am saying that while not being exactly a fan of XML-based formats.

> The initial vision of MathML was that people would write it in a WYSIWYG editor (since it’s far too verbose to write by hand), but that grossly misjudged users’ preferences

To be honest, it probably depends heavily on a particular audience. I know people who barely wraps their heads around the concept of BBCode, and those (although a much smaller group) who would probably advocate for exchanging Microsoft Word for a LaTeX editor. Most people out here are probably completely content with a WYSIWYG editor and don’t care about the inner mechanism of its implementation as long as it gives an expected effect for them.

You can use a WYSIWYG editor to produce LaTeX (e.g. LyX). Regarding your point about ease of embedding in HTML/SVG, we embed other formats in markup all the time, e.g. CSS/JavaScript/images/etc. with nary an issue.

MathML is the equivalent of having to compile CSS/JavaScript into an XML-based “bytecode,” which then gets parsed and executed by the browser.

In this case though, the people who need to typeset a lot of mathematics are more likely in the LaTeX camp.

You make it sound as if you write HTML5 by hand when entering content in web pages. Do you have the same complaint for SVG diagrams or HTML tables, which are even worse for writing by hand than MathML?

I hope not. The key gain here is that the syntax used for mathematics in HTML needs to be easy to integrate in the web platform of 2021. Can you still use the DOM with MathML? Yes. Can you naturally interleave it with other HTML elements to create multi-modal constructions? Yes. With diagrams? SVG+MathML is possible, yes.

Indeed it is designed for technologists, solving a problem on the world wide web, as well as in other structured formats. And no, no one is asking mathematicians to type XML or HTML by hand in 2021.

An author can keep using latex, asciimath, Word or OpenOffice, MathType, MathQuill, or even Mathematica/Matlab/scipy syntax, as they've done until now. And then have their toolchain of choice prepare MathML to be served on the web, (or epub ebooks, etc), in a uniform manner understood by all vendors. Mere mortals can then finally create web apps that can natively access the math, without writing half-baked tex parsers that have hundreds of awkward and undocumented special cases.

TeX syntax has no path to richer integrations into the web platform and keeps mathematics out of reach for all modern ecosystem trends. I certainly think MathML can still be improved quite a bit - mostly by making it smaller and simpler, so that anyone can pick it up in an hour and write a new app in a day.

MathML is supposed to be generated by software and rendered by browser. You're free to write LaTeX JavaScript convertor which could convert LaTeX to MathML (and probably those convertors already exist). Nobody is going to ask users to write MathML, just like nobody is asking users to write proper HTML.

Supporting MathML instead of LaTeX makes sense, because it's machine-readable language which is easy to generate and parse. HTML uses XML-like notation, SVG uses XML notation, so it only makes sense for equations to use XML notation instead of completely different language.

The DOM in most rendered web sites is far removed from any HTML directly read or written by humans. People can use whatever markup language they want and know that if it compiles to MathML, it will render in any browser.

LaTeX support was a really long shot to be standardized and implemented consistently across browsers. It's just too powerful. For LaTeX users, the only thing that MathML standardization changes is that MathML is now part of the target language that a LaTeX implementation compiles to. Maybe that will be useful; maybe not.

MathML dates from a time when XML was seen as the One True Way by most standards people. The fact that TeX is not based on XML was probably enough to discount it at the time. Nevermind that TeX is more convenient to write by far, and was already strongly established as the standard way of encoding mathematical formulas.

I am sad that Unicode Math never got wider acceptance.

It is eloquent and can be picked up in an hour or two by end users.

One of the sadder ignored standard, right up their with Bluetooth media control which is also super simple and easy to understand, and only ever partially implemented. (Seriously, go through both specs!)

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