Mathjax
mathjax.com
mathjax.com
Paul Topping Design Science, Inc. (one of the MathJax founders)
N.B. Being able to benefit from unexpected advances like this is exactly why I standardized on LaTeX, even though it's kind of a pain to convert it to HTML. If you're trying to solve the math typesetting problem and not using LaTeX, you're on the wrong (coughMathMLcough) track.
Also, what would be really orgasmic is if it would be possible to type math in Latex inside the browser and see it displayed nicely like that. But this is probably asking for too much.
It always surprises me how difficult math on the Internet has turned out to be. Hopefully this can help...
<math mode="display" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
<mrow>
<mi>x</mi>
<mo>=</mo>
<mfrac>
<mrow>
<mo form="prefix">−<!-- − --></mo>
<mi>b</mi>
<mo>±<!-- ± --></mo>
<msqrt>
<msup>
<mi>b</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>−<!-- − --></mo>
<mn>4</mn>
<mo>⁢<!-- ⁢ --></mo>
<mi>a</mi>
<mo>⁢<!-- ⁢ --></mo>
<mi>c</mi>
</msqrt>
</mrow>
<mrow>
<mn>2</mn>
<mo>⁢<!-- ⁢ --></mo>
<mi>a</mi>
</mrow>
</mfrac>
</mrow>
</math>
They never had anything to do with one another, it's just the module that Microsoft happened to dump it in.
Not completely true... The X in XHR stands for XML, as that's what it parses natively [1], whereas parsing JSON wasn't native until relatively recently. JavaScript had Java's syntax. Not sure about hamsters and ham...
1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534370(VS.85).aspx
JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.
Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).
It's Pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics#Pataphor