I should clarify that I am not opposed to HTML entities. They've been around long enough for the bugs to have been ironed out, and unlike JavaScript, they do not cause memory leaks or infinite loops or other challenges to the efficient management of computational resources if the people who maintain my browser did not do everything exactly right.
Just trying to understand your position.
Right - to be explicit, then, I agree they are not strictly necessary, still think they would be convenient as things are currently, but also that if the help included a link to unicodelookup or a similar utility (which, if LaTeX is implemented, it should do as part of a "please don't abuse this feature" note), this advantage mostly goes away and they become pointless after all.
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!