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by est31 2660 days ago
It's very good news that this has finally started. Wikipedia, probably the biggest website that displays formulas, still renders them to SVG images.

Igalia had already been improving WebKit's [1] MathML renderer and they had a fundraiser for the Chromium MathML work for a long time. Now they seem to collected enough to start with it. It's one of the great advantages of open source that a small company like Igalia can just go and improve multiple rendering engines used by billions of people.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6803/improvements-in-mathml-renderin...

3 comments

That's probably because MathML support is pretty poor in most browsers and even on Firefox, which has the best support, it isn't really good enough for all uses. MathJax has various backends to render LaTeX formulas, including SVG, MathML and HTML-CSS. Here's what the MathJax documentation says about the MathML backend:

"The NativeMML output processor uses the browser’s internal MathML support (if any) to render the mathematics. Currently, Firefox has native support for MathML, and IE has the MathPlayer plugin for rendering MathML. Safari has some support for MathML since version 5.1, but the quality is not as high as either Firefox’s implementation or IE with MathPlayer. Chrome, Konqueror, and most other browsers don’t support MathML natively, but this may change in the future, since MathML is part of the HTML5 specification."

"The advantage of the NativeMML output processor is its speed, since native MathML support is usually faster than converting to HTML-with-CSS and SVG. The disadvantage is that you are dependent on the browser’s MathML implementation for your rendering, and these vary in quality of output and completeness of implementation. MathJax relies on features that are not available in some renderers (for example, Firefox’s MathML support does not implement the features needed for labeled equations). While MathJax’s NativeMML output processor works around various limitations of Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit, the results using the NativeMML output processor may have spacing, font, or other rendering problems that are outside of MathJax’s control."

Those WebKit enhancements have ended up in surprising places. @acabel produced Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for Standard Ebooks and upgraded the pipeline to use Firefox to render MathML to png for Kindle, etc. Turns out that the Kobo renderer which seems to be WebKit based was able to display MathML directly, so the kepubs we build just have the plain MathML in them now.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...

"Wikipedia, probably the biggest website that displays formulas, still renders them to SVG images."

Not exactly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula#Na...

Even users on Firefox only get to see the SVG images per default.