[nhamann]

It depends on the type of article. I write a lot of blog posts about math. The most convenient way to do this is using Mathjax. If browsers had native support for mathematical notation then I would be inclined to agree with you, but this is not currently the case.

[logn]

Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.

[nhamann]

I don't know how extensive Unicode math symbols are, but it's unclear to me how you would display things like matrices and do alignment of multiline equations.

[logn]

I'm not sure either. But I know that you can do crazy things with unicode, and I'd bet that if you treated treated unicode as a sort of low-level compile-to target you could then design a high-level language from which to write math text. I'm not sure of the practical benefit and maybe this would be even more inaccessible to people... but still, I think JS is great, but wouldn't pure HTML and encodings be even cooler?

Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏

[lelf]

And load fonts with JS?

[lmm]

Isn't that what MathML is meant to do? Browser support is incomplete, but it sounds like a perfect use case for a javascript polyfill, so you could make pages that would work with either native browser support or javascript.