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Comment by chobytes | Hacker News Reader

Not sure who this is for. The notation looks extremely verbose and unusable, and latex won a long time ago already.

MathML is the only accessible option. Screen readers work with it.

Tools like KaTeX output both HTML and MathML simultaneously (HTML for rendering, MathML for screen readers), leading to massive page bloat. MathJax requires client-side JS to look good, which is a big 'no' for me.

Right now, there is no way to display math on the web that: (1) is accessible, (2) works across all modern browsers, (3) is not slow or bloated in some way. MathML in Chrome fixes basically all these problems.

I am not a blind but I would much prefer hearing latex formula word by word than whatever alternative they came up with(e.g "a slash pm b" or "slash frac a b"). I really doubt you can unambiguously say long formulas lot more succinctly. Even after having looked at the formula, I can't follow a lecture without having to look at the board and that is human translation which would be better than MathML.

Should the toolmakers priority not be to make a tool its users will use?

This sort of dictating opinions via tech seems common in the browser world, and it honestly makes me thankful we primarily target pdfs and not the web.

MathML has many potential uses. It's been around for a long time, and its advantages over LaTeX are clear if you've spent any amount of time with it.

Why I think LaTeX "won out":

1) Chrome dropped MathML 10ish years ago

2) MathJax got LaTeX support

3) People don't care about accessibility/ambiguity enough to bother with anything else

4) There aren't good, mainstream frontends for MathML other than MathType, making LaTeX more convenient to learn and use

I get the impression this is a tool made by technologists for technologists, rather than for people who spend a lot of time typesetting math. Academics (mathematicians, physicists, etc) don't have the same concerns as technologists, and the specifics of browser tech in particular are't relevant.

Latex is basically the mathematical (computer) lingua franca right now. Theres an entire cultural and technological ecosystem around latex thats been built up for many years. We even message each in latex notation when rendering isn't available! Theres decades of documentation online. Most important of all, its dead easy to use for most use cases!

Perhaps MathML is technically superior in some ways, but none that the people typesetting math are concerned with. That this is browser oriented tech in particular is already a disadvantage, as the browser is not a priority to us. In this way mathjax feels like the superior tool for users. It attempts to work with users rather than dictating to them.

I think MathML might not have failed so hard if it weren't so ludicrously verbose and time-consuming to type compared to TeX notation.

XML apologists generally propose special editors to make the experience less unpleasant, but that's not what working users of mathematics want.

TeX notation provides a way for us to type formulae in plain text form, anywhere that ascii is accepted, as fast as we can type normal text. That's the bare minimum required for any representation to be relevant to mathematicians and physicists.

I don't know what a more 'web flavoured' notation satisfying this constraint would look like. (Are web standards people even capable of brevity?)

Yeah thats very true and I didnt think to mention it. I very much appreciate how concise latex is, and that I don't need any special editor for it.

Regarding (4), I suppose you can argue if this counts as "good" or "mainstream" but the equation editor in OpenOffice & LibreOffice supports saving as MathML, AFAIK.

Just ease of installing and standardization would rule out latex. Latex packaging is nightmare. Verbosity will be solved by tones of JS and python packages.

The two

> Latex packaging is nightmare.

and

> Verbosity will be solved by tones of JS and python packages.

seem at odds to me.

Anecdata, but thats not been my experience. Ive found latex to be a much smoother experience to use than languages like js or python.

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