When I write posts I use raw HTML. Yes, the modern thing to do is probably Markdown, but HTML was designed for hand-coding and still works well for that if you don't want anything especially fancy. But what if you want math?
Previously when I've wanted to do math I've written it out as fixed-width ASCII:
e^(-7t)
In my editor this looks like:
<pre> e^(-7t) </pre>
This is reasonably readable, works anywhere, and I like the aesthetic. I probably should have stuck with it, but after helping publish a report that included some traditionally-formatted equations and learning that MathML has been supported cross-browser since the beginning of the year (thanks Igalia!), I decided to try it out. I wrote the equations in two recent posts in it, and am mixed on the experience.
It definitely does look nicer:
On the other hand, here's how it looks in my editor:
<math display=block>
<msup>
<mi>e</mi>
<mrow>
<mo>-</mo>
<mn>7</mn>
<mi>t</mi>
</mrow>
</msup>
</math>
There's a small learning curve on when to use the different tags, but
mostly it's just very verbose. And I think, needlessly so? That
"-" is an operator, "7" is a number, and
"t" is an identifier could all be the default. Then I
could just write:
<math display=block>
<msup>
e
<mrow>
-7t
</mrow>
</msup>
</math>
And we could remove many uses of <mrow> too: a
series of characters without whitespace separating them could
be already treated as a group:
<math display=block> <msup> e -7t </msup> </math>
Of course if you wanted to use a character for a non-traditional purpose you could still mark it up as one, but a good set of defaults would make MathML much more pleasant. I'd hate to have to read and write blog posts as:
<word><lt>h</lt><lt>e</lt><lt>l</lt><lt>l</lt><lt>o</lt></word> <word><lt>w</lt><lt>o</lt><lt>r</lt><lt>l</lt><lt>d</lt></word> <pnct>.</pnct>
I know I'm about 25 years too late on this, and I'm happy that a pure-HTML solution is now cross-browser, but it's still sad we ended up so close to a comfortable hand-editable solution.
(Just use MathJax? Nope—I don't want a runtime dependency on JS. Though I could see including a LaTeX-to-MathML or a MathML-verbosifier step at build time.)
Have you heard the good news about server-side MathJax rendering?
Quoting gwern on the subject:
The complexity has been quite minimal. You npm install one executable, which you run on a HTML file in place, and it's done. After the npm install, it's fairly hassle-free after that; you don't even need to host the webfonts if you don't want to. We chose to for some additional speed. (It's not the size, but the latency: an equation here or there will pull in a few fonts which aren't that big, but the loading of a new domain and reflow take time.) IIRC, over the, I dunno, 6 years that I've been using it, there has only been 1 actual bug due to mathjax-node... (read more)