Yesterday I found myself composing a reply to LW in one tab while using 2 other tabs to look up text and URLs so I could paste them into my reply. Under your proposal, MathJax would run in all 3 of the tabs even with Chrome's process-per-tab architecture, and when I needed a page, I needed it now and having to wait for it would have interrupted my train of thought.
How old is your machine? My computer is aging and creaky, and it can easily handle MathJax running in several tabs without any slowdown that I've been able to notice. In particular, any slowdown on page load is so slight that I haven't been able to see it.
There is no upper bound on the memory cost of loading a file of JavaScript, as is true of any Turing-complete programming language.
I was referring to the memory cost of loading the code itself, not of the heap memory which the program may allocate, which obviously will vary from minuscule to infinite depending on the program.
Does this particular JavaScript file not convert LaTex code into images?
No, it doesn't produce images. It generates HTML and CSS, which looks better and is a lot nicer for people wanting to increase the font size.
I notice you have not answered the direct question at the bottom of grandparent.
You mean this one? It must have slipped my mind:
ADDED. Those in favor of MathJax: do you want it for comments or just for top-level posts?
I want it for both comments and top-level posts. Why not?
I am guessing that you, sketerpot, are in the habit of reading a lot of formulae produced by LaTeX and writing a lot of LaTeX. Is that so?
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!