Support MathJax in Entries

[peoppenheimer]

Title:
Support MathJax in Entries

Area:
MathJax JavaScript support at site level

Summary:
I suggest that (in due time!) dw support MathJax <a href="http://www.mathjax.org/">MathJax</a> for mathematical/technical formatting in dw entries.

Description:
This suggestion is intended to make it easy for dw people to write beautiful and useful mathematical/technical content in our entries. MathJax is now a mature and well-supported FOSS extension of html via javascript, with healthy user and developer communities. We've been experimenting with MathJax for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and we've been very pleased with it so far. (This is not an official SEP endorsement.) Code can be written or displayed rendered or in TeX or MathML. This makes it useful also for gacking and modifying, and even for learning more about those markup languages. Anyone who has tried to do serious mathematical or technical typesetting in html will agree, I think, that html is *not* a typesetting language. MathJax goes a long way toward allowing decent technical typesetting in an html context.

If MathJax can be permitted as a tightly controlled JavaScript layer at the dw site level, which I think it can, then users will be able to write mathematical and technical fragments into their journal entries as easily as any other html. I don't envision putting MathJax support into the rich text editor -- I anticipate that anyone who wants to use MathJax will be comfortable editing their own markup. This is rather an extension of html markup into a wider domain.

It is possible that I'm overestimating the ease of implementing this suggestion, but I've experimented with MathJax support in my personal webpages and at the SEP site, and it looks as though MathJax makes this as easy as possible. Furthermore, the social/political aspects look promising, insofar as the MathJax user and developer communities look like just the sorts of folks dw wants to make alliance with, as far as I can tell.

Poll #12341 Support MathJax in Entries

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (31.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (6.4%)

(I have no opinion)
26 (55.3%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (4.3%)

Comments

[swaldman]

I've voted for, but my only reservation:

AIUI this would mean that some journals (those with MathJax markup) would require Javascript in order to display correctly. I don't think there's a way around this if we want to be able to display maths. And I think that being able to display maths is an excellent idea. Maybe we need to make sure that it fails to a polite message about how we can't display the maths without JS?

(I don't know how MathML is used, and whether that requires JS, and so whether direct MathML support would be an alternative, but AIUI browsers that support MathML are rather rare at the moment)

Re the "not in the RTE" part of the suggestion: Ideally I would like to see a way to put maths markup in the RTE. I wouldn't expect it to display as WYSIWYG, but it would be nice to be able to use maths without having to type raw HTML for everything else.