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.)
FYI, when cross-posted to Less Wrong, that math in your post gets rendered with MathJax, not browser-native MathML. (This is the case both on LW itself and on GreaterWrong.)
And it’s a good thing, too, because this is what I see in the original post, on your website:
It seems that Chrome only supports MathML starting with Chrome 109, which is not compatible with my version of macOS.
Also, caniuse.com reports the following:
(The “see details” link goes to a discussion on the blink-dev mailing list, which is… less than straightforwardly informative to an ordinary web developer, much less an ordinary web user. I’m still not sure what the differences are. But it’s not exactly reassuring.)
I didn't say they were. If you are 'skating on thin ice', you have by definition not fallen through and started to drown, because you can't skate and drown simultaneously. (At least, I can't.) My point is that you are engaged in sloppy coding practices, and so it's unsurprising that you are making mistakes like casually assuming that MathML can be copied around or would be compatible with random web applications, when you should know that the default assu... (read more)